i 



d 



J ir E$£ LL 



III 




Class E 

Book.__ 
Copyright N° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



GOD'S WAY OUT 



REV. WM. M. CAMPBELL 



THE WINONA PUBLISHING CO. 

CHICAGO, ILL. WINONA LAKE, IND. 



6T75I 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

DEC 30 1903 

Copyright Entry 
CLASS «- XXc. No. 



COPYRIGHT, 1903 

BY 

THE WINONA PUBLISHING CO. 



Control Number 




tmp96 



027958 



GOD'S WAY OUT 



CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



Whether you may be an inquirer for the way 
of life I know not. But this I know — it is a way 
of blessedness most precious and profitable. It 
has God's gracious, fatherly oversight and keep- 
ing along the journey here. It issues in the un- 
alloyed, unspeakable and unending joys of His 
immediate presence hereafter. 

I would fain impress this upon you. Allow me 
therefore, in this opening chapter, to give a few 
reasons serving to show in some measure its sur- 
passing claim upon your thought and action. If 
you are already an earnest seeker after the way 
bear with me a little for the sake of someone who 
may not be. 

The question of bread, in one form or other, 
has never lost its interest for the human family. 
Its need and how to obtain it has perforce en- 
gaged their attention and effort through all the 
centuries. This common and unfailing interest 
attests the importance of this way of the natural 
life in the thought of mankind. 



Gob's Was Out 



Now should there be a similar interest shown 
always and everywhere in the way of the super- 
natural or spiritual life, would it not equally at- 
test the importance, both of the way and of all 
inquiry concerning it? Truly. Now this has 
been one of the great, outstanding facts of hu- 
man history. A recognition of the relationship of 
this life, for good or ill, to the world of the invis- 
ible, has characterized the human family amid all 
the variations of its earthly destiny. The law of 
God, unwritten or written, has been so present 
and operative everywhere, that the inevitable 
sense of alienation wrought thereby has led, just 
as surely, to efforts having for their object the 
propitiation of the invisible Power. The ques- 
tion, "How can man be just with God ?" has been 
of perennial and world-wide interest. It may be, 
as it has been, answered, now in one way and now 
in another, by different peoples, but the fact of its 
unfailing presence and its attempted answer by 
all, is surely a tribute to its importance as one of 
the great and undying race questions of this mor- 
tal life. 

Not only so — in making the estimate you must 
have regard to the sacrifices which men have been 
willing to make in answer thereto. This it is 
which reveals the awful gravity of the need and 
the intensity of the grasp which this question has 



GoVs WL&y ©ut 



upon the heart and mind of man. It has been 
recognized as one involving life and death, so 
that, in answering it, life, in one way or other, has 
been prominent as a solving element. Life has 
been realized as forfeited, and, in the hope of 
making good the loss, life has been offered by 
way of acknowledgment. 

Now this confession and hope finds typical or 
symbolic expression in the offering of the lower 
animal life. But this did not always satisfy the 
human heart, crying out, under the pressure of 
its deep-seated cravings. Amid the blindness of 
their sin-darkened nature and the greatness of 
their need they hesitated not to offer the life of 
man himself. Human sacrifices attest the great- 
ness and intensity of man's conscious need. They 
bring home to you, as nothing else merely human 
can, the surpassing importance of all inquiry as 
to the way of life — of the question, "How shall a 
man be just with God?" 

And not only in the days of old were children 
immolated on sacrificial altars for the sin of the 
soul, but in the modern years have they been 
given over to death out of deference to this crav- 
ing of the human spirit. 

Then, too, all the infinite variety and degree of 
self-inflicted penance, found along the line of 
effort after a condition where the soul may feel 



OoVs TOas <S>ut 



that the question of its being just with God has 
been answered satisfyingly — this also joins in 
unison with the rest proclaiming the transcendant 
importance of the inquiry. 

Neither are you to overlook or forget the fact 
that this inquiry concerns a life compared to 
which, in duration, the present dwindles into utter 
insignificance. Onward, onward, ever and end- 
lessly onward as the duration of God himself, 
while at the same time filled with the unspeak- 
ably glorious elements of a never ceasing and 
limitless growth, — what a life is this as compared 
to that of the present transient existence. 

How it impressed the minds and hearts of 
prophet and apostle and with what vivid imagery 
they gave expression to the fact. "My days are 
swifter than a post." "Man that is born of a 
woman is of few days and full of trouble." "Be- 
hold thou hast made my days as an handbreadth : 
and mine age is as nothing before thee." "Re- 
member how short my time is: wherefore hast 
thou made all men in vain ?" "Thou carriest them 
away as with a flood : they are as a sleep : in the 
morning they are like grass which groweth up." 
"We spend our years as a tale that is told." "For 
who knoweth what is good for man in this life, 
all the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a 
shadow?" "Mine age is departed, and is re- 



OoVb Mas ©ut 



moved from me as a shepherd's tent." "For 
what is your life? It is even a vapor, that ap- 
peareth for a little time, and then vanisheth 
away." "For all flesh is as grass, and all the 
glory of man as the flower of the grass." "For 
we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as 
were all our fathers: our days on the earth are 
as a shadow, and there is none abiding." 

When you consider then the brevity of the life 
temporal as compared to the life eternal, surely 
the conviction cannot be avoided that an inquiry 
concerning it is of the last importance. 

This conviction will surely be deepened when, 
in addition to this contrast as to duration, there 
is the further fact to be remembered that what 
that immeasurable future life is to be, must be 
determined in the present — fleeting as it is. And 
not only fleeting, even when its full measure is 
granted, but how much more so when you con- 
sider its uncertainty. "The places that now know 
us shall soon know us no more forever." Here 
to-day, perhaps in the flood-tide of life. And to- 
morrow the clods of the valley are over you. 

"Like a snow flake on the river, 
A moment white, then gone forever." 

Surely then the brevity and uncertainty of 
human life here as compared to that of the fu- 



©ofc's TKHas Qui 



ture, and its determining influence in relation to 
the character of that future, gives surpassing in- 
terest and importance to an inquiry as to how the 
life that now is shall issue in a glorious immor- 
tality. 

But still further, in order to enhance it, you are 
not to be unmindful of the tremendous individual 
interests, as to happiness or blessedness, which 
are involved. They are both personal and rel- 
ative and in their sweep embrace the here and the 
hereafter. The natural result of sin when oper- 
ative is to create and foster strife, and mutual re- 
pulsion between all the elements of being. From 
its baleful presence peace flees. Everything be- 
comes Ishmaelitic, in so far forth as sin holds 
sway. An inkling of the horrid brood which it 
genders is given in Gal. Chap. V. Death is in the 
wake of all its movements. It throws everything 
out of gear. The chariot wheels of life drive 
heavily where it enters. And enter everywhere it 
would, if it could, dethrone God and reduce all 
being to chaos and night. The blessed harmony 
of the family life, as between the eternal Father 
and his human children, it destroyed. It sent 
them adrift. Instead of being made glad by the 
Father's presence and seeking it, it filled them 
with an awful dread and drove them to seek a 
hiding place from him whose name is LOVE. 



(Soft's TOa£ <§>ut 



"Can two walk together except they be agreed?" 
What fellowship hath light with darkness, love 
with hate, life with death? Is it a light thing to 
be thus thrown out of harmony with God? To 
become mutually repellant? What about your 
happiness, in view of such a relation, when it 
confronts you always and everywhere? 

As between yourself and another human being 
the unhappiness engendered by the friction of 
one's presence might be measurably, if not alto- 
gether, neutralized through the separations of 
time and distance. But what think you when you 
cannot thus flee from the hated presence ? When 
the element that engenders the hateful repulsion 
is ever present, irreconcilable, implacable? So 
long as such a relation continues, so long as you 
are consciously encompassed on all sides by One, 
between whom and you there is no harmony, — 
then farewell happiness, blessedness, peace and 
enter the dark brood of death. 

Now an inquiry concerning a way by which 
there will be a reversal of all these conditions and 
results — think you is the same unimportant? An 
affirmative reply to such a query would be the 
saddest and strongest indication of your individ- 
ual need of it. 

You are also to bear in mind that next to being 
in peace and harmony with God, your greatest 

7 



Gofc's TKIla$ ©ut 



need — so far as the restful comfort of your spirit 
is concerned — is to be at peace with yourself. 

You know what dire havoc conscience plays at 
times with this inward rest. It frequently en- 
kindles in the minds of the enemies of God the 
very fires of hell while they are yet upon the 
earth. And often does it sorely chastise the souls 
of God's redeemed children. They walk in bond- 
age and darkness and great discomfort until the 
evil thing, in reference to which conscience ap- 
plies the lash, is penitently put away. A dis- 
turbed conscience is a bad bed-fellow. 

"O, coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me;" 

"My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, 

And ever tongue brings a several tale, 
And every tale condemns me for a villian." 

"Now conscience wakes despair 
That slumbered, wakes the bitter memory 
Of what he was, what is, and what must be." 

"Thus Conscience does make cowards of us all." 

And what is true of conscience, as one of the 
factors of the soul's life, is also true of others. 
If there be friction in machinery it will not run 
smoothly. Destruction is at work. And sim- 
ilarly in the make-up of our personalities. There 
must be harmony between the various estates of 

8 



Gob's Was Qui 



mansoul or the evil results of civil war will be 
experienced and shown. "A house divided against 
itself cannot stand." There must be peace within 
all our soul's borders if the happiness and blessed- 
ness and fruitfulness of a sweet content is to be 
our portion. But we are each aware that the bal- 
ance of power has been destroyed by sin and the 
normal harmonies of the inner life have ceased. 
"The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the 
Spirit against the flesh" even in the lives of God's 
children and would again abidingly lord it over 
them were it not for the divine help. But the 
consciousness of a progressive inner harmony 
with the assurance that the same will be at last 
perfected and abide forever — this brings the 
sweetness of the peace of heaven amid the war- 
ring conditions of the earthly life. 

But to those who are not within the charmed 
circle of this goodly fellowship the elements and 
conditions of an abiding warfare in the soul are 
ever present. More pronounced in some they 
may be than in others, and in the same person at 
one time than at another. But this jarring dis- 
cord within one's self will mar the soul life and 
be one of the conditions of the unspeakable 
wretchedness of the world to come. The per- 
ceivings of your understanding and the sober re- 
flections and conclusions of your "reason are 



Gob's Was ©ut 



swept aside and made of none effect as you are 
tossed about like foam upon the waters by the 
imperious power of your passions. Think you is 
such an adjustment of the relations of the re- 
spective powers of your being a guarantee, either 
that the angel of peace will become your guest, 
or, having entered your dwelling, that you can 
hope for his abiding presence to bless your soul ? 

Again, then, do I ask in all sobriety, whether an 
inquiry regarding a way of life which involves 
the restoration of the sweetness of inner harmony 
and the blessedness of being at peace with one- 
self, both now and forever — whether this be not 
one of overshadowing import? "Holy" is to be 
made "whole" or restored to perfect health. This 
is the goal for which the Apostle prayed. 
(I Thess. 5:23.) And being at peace with God 
and yourself the outgoings of your soul toward 
others will be along pathways over which the 
dove is flying. It will be that of good-will toward 
men. 

Think you then that an inquiry concerning a 
way of life which will issue in the establishing of 
peace between your soul and God, peace in your 
soul, peace between your soul and your fellows — 
think you is this an inquiry of secondary mo- 
ment? Nay, nay, but weighty as the issues are 
eternal. 



(Soft's Was ©ut 



Then, too, not only the good or ill effects to 
oneself, from being in or out of the way, throw 
this question to the front among the great inter- 
ests of life, but its importance is intensified in 
view of your unavoidable relation to other lives. 

The Apostle expresses this fact when he says : 
"No man liveth unto himself and no man dieth 
unto himself." So that it is wide of the truth to 
say — as some do in reference to certain people, 
who, in some respects may be living unworthily 
— "They do not harm any one but themselves." 
Scripture, history and all experience refute such 
a claim. 

This mutual relation and influence in the realm 
of the spiritual is affirmed and beautifully illus- 
trated by Paul in I Cor. xii. And the same fact 
in another connection, has been given poetic ex- 
pression as follows: 

"Like warp and woof all destinies 

Are woven fast, 
Linked in sympathy like the keys 

Of an organ vast ; 
Pluck one thread and the whole ye mar ; 

Break but one 
Of a thousand keys, and the paining jar 

Through all will run. 

This invests your life with an awful signifi- 
cance. To be helpful in influencing other lives 



QoVb TKIiag Qut 



for good, consciously or unconsciously — is it not 
worthy of your consecrated ambition? Will it 
not be among your present and most abiding 
joys? To freight other lives to lower levels — 
should not the possibility of this give you pause ? 
And one or the other we must do. 

If God has granted you the endearing relations 
and sweet fellowship of the family life, as a par- 
ent, how can you look into the confiding eyes of 
the precious little ones and realize that to them, 
for the time being, you are the exemplar after 
whom they are trustfully and lovingly, if unwit- 
tingly patterning — without being grasped by the 
thought of life's solemnities? To so stand re- 
lated involves the holiest of joys — if it issue in 
their lives in the confirmation of all worthiness. 
To have them "arise and call you blessed" — the 
music of heaven is in this. But confirmation in 
any evil way through your agency — what a black- 
ness of horror it will ultimately bring you. To 
have a child in the way of death justly point an 
accusing finger at you — this will make you feel 
the agonizing discord of the damned. 

And the same holds good, or bad, in varying 
measure, through all the wider circles of the life 
that you now "lead in the flesh." Whether you are 
in the way of life or out of it will mean much as 
to whether others are or are not to walk therein. 



OoVs Wa$ <§>ut 



It is an inquiry concerning a way, the walking 
in which will issue in "glory, honor, immortality." 
There is light, love, liberty, life in the highest 
measure, in the highest heavens, in the highest 
and goodliest fellowships of the ages, in the pres- 
ence of the Highest, and that for ever and ever. 

To refrain from it is to abide under the 
shadows of a way that issues in darkness unut- 
terable. You will abide in the "outer darkness," 
in the "blackness of darkness/' in hate, in bond- 
age, in death, in the deepest measure, in the 
abysses, in the lowest and most evil companion- 
ships of the ages, in the presence of the great 
spirit of evil, and that for ever and ever. 

And again I ask you whether an inquiry into 
these things is to be deemed unimportant or 
whether, on the other hand, it is of such over- 
shadowing import that naught else in the heights 
or the depths should exclude it from thought and 
action. 

And yet, in the face of all this mighty pressure 
of interest, such is the natural tendency and bias 
of the soul, through the alluring presence of sin, 
that it slumbers amid the play of contending 
forces, the warring of the spiritual realms of 
light and darkness. 

Under the captivating and absorbing fascina- 
tions of divers lusts, pleasures and pursuits, 

13 



OoVs Was Out 



legitimate or otherwise, often against the voices 
which its own saner self utters in more thoughtful 
moods, and against the gentle monitions of the 
invisible worlds, within and without, it is led on 
and on in procrastinating folly until "life's fitful 
fever" is suddenly ended and — does he rest well ? 

Wide awake, captive absorption in the things 
of time and sense while drowsily slumbering as 
to the abiding verities of the spiritual and eter- 
nal! 

You lie abed of a morning under the spell of 
its comfort while perhaps aware that duty and in- 
terest are calling to be up betimes. And then 
with a troubled sense of loss you frantically pur- 
sue the fleeing opportunities and possibilities of 
the day, humming the refrain, "It might have 
been." , 

Yes, if life's day passes and the night comes 
and you find that, so far as the real issues of hu- 
man destiny are concerned, you have been out 
of the way and your feet are beginning to "stum- 
ble on the dark mountains" — what a pitiable re- 
frain for a memory mocked future to despair- 
ingly cry, "It might have been." 

But why dwell further on this? Surely there 
is no need. Your soul must be in frivolous mood 
indeed, or held fast amid the slumbering of sen- 
sibilities induced by that great triumvirate of 

14 



Gob's Was ©ut 



evil "the world, the flesh and the devil," if, in the 
presence of these considerations and under the 
pressure of these motives, you still regard the in- 
quiry as one of little moment. 

But I am persuaded better things of you. 

"Life is real, life is earnest 

And the grave is not its goal, 

Dust thou art, to dust returnest, 

Was not spoken of the soul." 

Voices from the past, from the present, from 
the future; voices from within, from without; 
voices from time, from eternity; voices from the 
great deeps, from the everlasting heights; are 
harmoniously attesting its destiny deciding im- 
port. 

Enter upon it. Enter upon it. 



15 



CHAPTER II. 



SIN. 



"Thou shalt call his name JESUS : for he shall 
save his people from their sins." The Saviour 
implies the sinner. Salvation presupposes sin. 
Without it both would be meaningless. Let us 
briefly consider it for it is one of the awful facts 
of the universe. It has entered our fair world. 
It is in each life. Its blasting presence is every- 
where. But for it, what need of inquiring about 
God's way of salvation. 

What is it? To this many answers have been 
given from philosophical as well as from moral 
and religious view points. I recall the following 
declaration regarding life in an old text-book, 
"What life is we know not. What life does we 
know well.' , The remark might be applied to sin, 
judging by the theories in reference to it. 

But for our present purpose and your need take 
the following brief but comprehensive statement. 
"Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgres- 
sion of the law of God." 

We may look at the matter at first in a some- 

16 



Gob's Mas Out 



what apparently cold, logical and historical fash- 
ion, so as to judge from the facts how you are to 
be classified. Having done so we must then come 
to closer quarters as becometh inquirers and an 
inquiry related to the great things of life, death 
and immortality. And my hope is that the exam- 
ination will set you forward in, or, at least, truly 
toward the pathway of life. 

Well then how is it with you from the stand- 
point of a defective conformity to the law of 
God? There are sins of omission as well as of 
commission. God's children, under the guidance 
of the Spirit, pray for forgiveness not only for 
what they do which is contrary to the will of 
God, but also for what they fail in being and do- 
ing according to His requirements. 

And this is true in all our earthly relations as 
well. In all of these there is the reign of law — 
albeit it may be and ought to be the law of love. 
And that law, whatever its expression, requires 
full consecration of the whole being from those 
who are living under it — be it the relation and 
law of friendship, or that of the citizen, or of the 
closer relations and intimacies of the family life. 
In all of these the demand is that we rise up to the 
full measure of that ideal — the pattern of which 
was shown in the mount of God. Failing in this 
we are not what the law contemplates we should 
2 17 



®oV& Mas ©ut 



be. Its majesty is offended. And if provision be 
not made in some way by which your defect can be 
reconciled with the perfect maintenance of its 
majesty, then you will be the one to suffer for fail- 
ure to reach up to and move companionably with 
it along the high plane where it lives and moves 
and has its being. And, for the present, we are 
not taking into consideration any such provision. 
You are to stand in your own strength in rigid 
relation to the laws of whatever sphere you oc- 
cupy. And any failure to rise to the perfect meas- 
ure of the law of that sphere will be an offence to 
it. It will resent it. You have not perfectly con- 
formed yourself to the law of the realm of friend- 
ship, of citizenship, of parental, marital, or filial 
responsibility, as the case may be. You are, 
therefore, in relation thereto, a sinner from defect, 
from omission, from a want of conformity. 

As a child you may possibly be able to say in 
reference to parental law, "Neither at any time 
transgressed I thy commandment," while yet the 
fact may remain that in disposition, thought, pur- 
pose, effort, you have fallen short of a universal, 
unfailing, and generous surrender of yourself, as 
was meet, to the loving furtherance of all domes- 
tic interests. Times there were when conduct was 
influenced by a cold, calculating prudence, which, 
while not stopping short of the bald, literal re- 

18 



<3ofc's Was <§>ut 



quirements of duty, yet did not overleap them in 
deference to the spirit of an obedience rendered 
in love. While actual transgression may not be 
charged up against you, yet clearly you are not 
conformed in heart, in all the elements of your 
being, to the law which should govern your filial 
relationship. 

Similarly as between husband and wife may 
there be witnessed a fulfillment of obligations 
which, after a fashion, entitles each to mutually 
deny the charge of transgression, while yet there 
is all along a woeful absence of conformity to the 
spirit of the law which should govern their relation . 

And this results in the neutralizing of that 
sweet fellowship that would otherwise be. The 
place thereof is usurped or supplanted by a pain- 
ful consciousness of wounded sensibilities. Du- 
ties are decorously attended to from day to day. 
But they are only so many automatic movements 
out of which the soul of music has fled. Fulfilled, 
possibly, with scrupulous fidelity, the family life 
has yet become a formal routine, from the cold 
respectability of which love has taken its flight to 
more genial climes. 

"The harp that once through Tara's halls 

The soul of music shed, 
Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls 
As if that soul were fled." 

19 



<3ofc'5 XKIla^ <smt 



Absence of conformity, in spirit as well as in 
fact, from the very foundations of the being in 
the inner dispositions, upward and outward 
through all the expressed life, is to be and is 
recognized as an offence, a sin, against the high 
and holy behests of righteous law. 

And if this be so as to life's human relations 
what about those you sustain to the divine ? What 
is true of the one is also of the other. Only in 
the latter the absence of conformity, in view of the 
inconceivably higher nature of the relation, is a 
sin which is unspeakably intensified. He who 
said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," 
said also, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy 
strength and with all thy mind." This goes to 
the very foundation elements of one's being, re- 
quiring "truth in the inward parts." And if your 
response does not rise up to the full measure of 
this universal requirement there is a lack of har- 
mony between your being and that of the holy 
One. To that extent you are unholy, defective, 
not conformable to the nature and character of 
Him before whom angels covered their faces as 
they cried: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of 
hosts." Were it possible for you to say, "Neither 
at any time transgressed I thy commandment," 
the question of conformity to the divine character 



GoV& Mas <S>ut 



and will throughout the whole gamut of your be- 
ing would still have to be met and answered. 
And, in the absence of an answer universally 
affirmative, you thereby acknowledge a rift in the 
lute of your life, the dissonance of which indicates 
that between you and God there is a failure in 
concord. And this failure means the presence of 
the element of evil. You come short of the glory 
of God. Weighed in the balance and found want- 
ing. "How can two walk together except they 
be agreed?" Any failure as to congeniality be- 
tween your inmost nature and God adjudges you 
to be unholy — that is sinful. To that extent you 
are not like the holy One. "The heart is deceit- 
ful above all things and desperately wicked." 
"For from within, out of the heart of men, pro- 
ceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, mur- 
ders," "Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, de- 
ceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, 
foolishness :" "All these things come from with- 
in and defile the man." Surely when the fruits 
are so unholy, the tree — that is the inner nature, 
fountain, disposition or spring of action — cannot 
be holy. It is sinful. It is not conformed to God. 
A man may not, for the time being, transgress 
a prohibitory requirement because of the absence 
of temptation. But let the spark be applied and, 
lo, the absence of inner conformity suddenly re- 



Oofc's Mas 0\xt 



veals itself in positive transgression. Transgres- 
sion is an active devil. Want of conformity is a 
sleeping one. 

And if this be true along the lower ranges of 
life so also and much more along the higher. You 
may not be so explosive as another. Walpole 
said, "Every man has his price." It took more to 
convert the sleeping into an active devil in one 
than it did in another. But the possibility was in 
all. The process of the conversion is thus stated 
by the poet Pope: 

"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, 
That to be hated needs but to be seen, 
But seen too oft, familiar with its face, 
We first endure, then pity, then embrace." 

If your nature were fully conformed to the 
divine this dalliance with evil would not be per- 
mitted. Neither would you at any time have need 
to shed a tear of repentance in view of its fre- 
quent and victorious forays. 

The deep and ever present consciousness of 
this absence of full inner conformity to the char- 
acter and will of God, extorted from the Apostle 
to the Gentiles the agonizing cry, "O wretched 
man that I am ! Who shall deliver me from this 
body of death?" 

And those who have had the largest knowledge 



©o6'0 Wa^ ©ut 



of themselves, the deepest experience of the inner 
movements of sin, the most enrapturing visions 
of Him who is the "Chief among ten thousand 
and the one altogether lovely," the intensest 
yearnings after that holiness by which larger 
measure of the joys of divine fellowship would 
be their abiding portion — these choicest and saint- 
liest spirits of the race have ever been the ones 
to prostrate themselves before the Holy One in 
deepest humility. The larger the vision of the 
sinless One the greater the consciousness of and 
shrinking from sin. The rapt spirit of Isaiah, 
beholding the glory of the Lord, exclaimed, "Woe 
is me ! for I am undone ; because I am a man of 
unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a peo- 
ple of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the 
King, the Lord of hosts." The confession 
thereof, in all sincerity and humility, will attest 
the sinfulness of all absence of conformity to God 
as well as be an evidence of your holiness. The 
absence of such confession will attest your sin- 
fulness and the measure of your spiritual ignor- 
ance. On either showing you will class yourself, 
or you will be classed, as among the number of 
those whose needs call for the "fountain opened 
for sin and uncleanness" and the putting forth of 
the cry after a "clean heart and a right spirit." 
How is it with you then as to the conformity 

23 



GoVs Was <S>ut 



of your inner self to God ? Be still and commune 
with your own heart and, in the light of its reve- 
lations, or, if you please, the awful darkness 
thereof, as beheld in the light of God, be under 
the constraint of humbly bowing before him with 
the confession, "I am a sinful man O Lord." 

Now leaving the inner and more invisible 
region for the outer and more tangible sphere of 
transgression, are matters improved? If the 
former is of the nature of sin the latter is visibly 
and palpably so. Absence of inner harmony can- 
not be abidingly yoked to outer concord with 
God. Satan may attempt hypocritically to trans- 
form himself in appearance into an angel of God, 
but the mask cannot abide. "Doth a fountain send 
forth at the same place sweet water and bitter?" 
But the question now is not the possibility of an 
outward conformity, as to the matter of obedi- 
ence, which is at the same time vitiated before 
God because of its relation to an inner absence of 
conformity. On the contrary it is one simply of 
actual transgression. You do not hesitate to 
acknowledge the sinfulness of this. It is a posi- 
tive violation of law, written or unwritten. Acts 
and words and thoughts may be equally repre- 
hensible as to matter while there may be variations 
in the guiltiness of the personalities behind them. 



24 



OoVb Mas <§>ut 



You, under the light of a christian civilization, 
transgress. And the matter of your transgression 
may be precisely similar to that of another whose 
life and surroundings are pagan. What of your 
sin as compared to his? "To whom much is 
given of them much shall be required.'' For you, 
as a result, there is awaiting the infliction of 
many stripes while he will be visited with few. 

So also as to the matter of transgression in your 
own life at different stages. It may be precisely 
similar at one time as at another while the guilt 
thereof may vary greatly. "Some sins in them- 
selves and by reason of several aggravations are 
more heinous in the sight of God than others." 

There may thus be heights and depths of sin, 
mountain ranges and sky piercing peaks of trans- 
gression, billowy upheavals of iniquity — but un- 
derneath all these phenomenal exhibitions of sin's 
forceful, and daring depravity, there are the con- 
tinental and oceanic stretches, characteristic of 
the multitudinous millions of all times and ages. 

Your soul may rise up in an intense manifesta- 
tion of righteous wrath, or be melted into un- 
utterable pathos, in view of the transgressions of 
men against the law of love. There are many 
Jacobs whose hearts are broken and whose grey 
hairs are brought down with sorrow to the grave 



25 



Gob's Mas Out 



because of filial transgression. Poor King Lear, 
in the wild agony of his spirit, under the base 
treatment of one of his daughters, cried : 

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
To have a thankless child!" 

You exclaim against these and all other viola- 
tions of the laws of man's most cherished and holy 
relations. What think you then when the rela- 
tion and the violation are not human but divine? 
Isaiah declares the enormity of this in the follow- 
ing vivid terms : "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, 
O earth ; for the Lord hath spoken, I have nour- 
ished and brought up children, and they have re- 
belled against me." "The ox knoweth his owner, 
and the ass his master's crib : but Israel doth not 
know, my people doth not consider." 

It is bad enough as between man and man. But 
as between man and his Maker it is horrible. 
Sometimes even the very brutes put him to shame. 
A farmer started to plow a field with a yoke of 
oxen. Something having gone wrong he flew 
into a great rage and beat one of the oxen un- 
mercifully. Shortly afterward, passing in front 
of the ox, the abused animal raised his large eyes 
toward him and licked his arm. This act brought 
so forcefully to the mind of the man a discourse 
he had recently heard from the text, "The ox 

26 



Oo&'s Was <smt 



knoweth his owner, etc." that he could not pro- 
ceed with his work. He unyoked his oxen with 
the result that he was led penitently to God and 
he inscribed over the stall of the now favorite ox 
the text, "The ox knoweth his owner, etc." 

Because of what God is — a Spirit, unchange- 
able in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, 
goodness and truth — to so act is the exhibition 
of criminal ignorance or unutterably foolhardy, 
impious daring. 

Because of what God does — loading us daily 
with his benefits and with loving patience bearing 
with our unnumbered provocations — to so act is 
such an exhibition of deep dyed ingratitude, such 
a self-willed departure from God, that the prophet 
calls upon the heavens to express their astonish- 
ment : "Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and 
be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the 
Lord. For my people have committed two evils ; 
they have forsaken me the fountain of living 
waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cis- 
terns, that can hold no water." 

Inanimate nature shews forth the praise of 
God and the animate but irrational worlds fulfill 
his will, a dumb brute recognizes his owner and 
licks the hand that abuses him — but man, upon 
whom God lavishes the treasures of his goodness, 
not only fails to gratefully respond, but spurns 



V 



God'0 Mas 0\xt 



the hand stretched forth in blessing, blasphemes 
the name of the holy One and tramples upon the 
laws which are "holy and just and good." 

How is it with you then ? Does not your con- 
science unmistakably say, "Thou art the man"? 
Whether it be a want of conformity or active 
transgression, in any event, is it not true that your 
"mouth must be stopped and you become guilty 
before God'' — you yourself being judge? Can 
you say aught else than to utter "I am a sinner" ? 

But, as to transgression of law, you are 
not to be unmindful of the fact that, even were 
you so fortunate as to escape the accusing finger 
pointed in condemnation because of grossly 
violated law, there was still a continental area 
beneath this filled with unnumbered hosts of sins, 
possible and actual, because of the inner, invisible, 
spiritual applications of the law. 

The Decalogue may, in your estimation, look- 
ing at it superficially, merely refer to what is ex- 
ternal in life and conduct. On such a supposition 
the belief may be entertained that it is a com- 
paratively easy matter to keep the commandments. 
As a result you may bear yourself jauntily in 
view of the supposedly limited area requiring 
your watchful care and because of the good suc- 
cess attending your effort — you yourself being 






©o&'s Ma^ ©ut 



judge — to keep this area free from sin's maraud- 
ing bands. You are living in the enjoyment of 
a peace to which you are not entitled and which is 
ill grounded — it is another case, as the prophet 
says, of crying, "Peace, peace, when there is no 
peace." 

You have never killed anybody or committed 
adultery. You are honest and speak the truth. 
Good, so far as it goes. But you must bear in 
mind that the law extends to the whole man. 
Whatever there is of us, as to our makeup or 
personality, from our innermost dispositions and 
thoughts right up and through to the outermost 
verge of our expressed life — over all this terri- 
tory the law claims and exercises jurisdiction. 
It has to do with me in all that constitutes me a 
separate individuality. So when the law says, 
"Thou shalt not kill," it does not follow because 
you have never been guilty of murder, as recog- 
nized by a civil tribunal, that therefore you are 
not a violator of this law. Anything at all in you, 
however faint, in the way of disposition or 
thought, which, if developed in harmony with its 
nature, would lead to the act of murder, or to 
anything else forbidden, is a transgression of the 
commandment just as truly as would be the out- 
breaking deed. 



29 



Gob's TKHas ©ut 



In fact even the literal consideration, at least of 
one of the commandments, will illustrate this. 
Take the third: "Thou shalt not take the name 
of the Lord thy God in vain," and you think of 
words. Take the sixth, or seventh, or eighth, 
and not words but deeds involuntarily rise up 
before your thought. But now consider the 
tenth : "Thou shalt not covet, etc." and instead of 
words and deeds, thoughts and dispositions are 
evidently summoned before its bar. 

In harmony with this spiritual extension of the 
law's applications was the declaration of the 
Lord of life himself, "Ye have heard that it was 
said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit 
adultery: But I say unto you, that whosoever 
looketh on a woman to lust after her hath com- 
mitted adultery with her already in his heart." 

Here then is an area from which your utmost 
vigilance cannot prevent the inroads of the Mid- 
ianites of sin. They roam everywhere. Over all 
are hanging the black thunder clouds of doom 
and the lightnings of a coming judgment which 
shall be rendered according to the law "The soul 
that sinneth it shall die." 

Being thus swept within the compass of the 
law's applications, from the Alpha to the Omega 
of your being, what say you of yourself before 
God, as to your guilt or innocence, as to your 



30 



OoVs Mas ©ut 



freedom or bondage ? The Apostle says, "All the 
world becomes guilty before God." "By the deeds 
of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his 
sight." What say you? Ah !" What can you say 
but, "I am a sinful man, O Lord." 

You have been considering sin in its relations 
from the view point of the presence or absence 
of conformity or transgression. But now look for 
a moment at sin, not as to its relations, but as to 
its appearance. How does it look? The phrase, 
"Ugly as sin," would seem to indicate the pre- 
vailing popular judgment regarding its looks. 
This finds memorable expression in literature in 
the second book of Paradise Lost. Satan in his 
flight arrives at hellhounds : 

"Before the gates there sat, 
On either side, a formidable shape: 
The one seemed woman to the waist and fair ; 
But ended foul in many a scaly fold 
Voluminous and vast; a serpent arm'd 
With mortal sting : About her middle round 
A cry of Hellhounds never ceasing bark'd 
With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rang 
A hideous peal ; yet, when they list, would creep, 
If aught disturb'd their noise, into her womb, 
And kennel there, yet there still bark'd and howl'd 
Within unseen. Far less abhorr'd than these 
Vex'd Scylla, bathed in the sea that parts 
Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore; 

31 



<3ofc's Mas ®ut 



Nor uglier follow the night hag, when call'd 
In secret, riding through the air she comes, 
Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance 
With Lapland witches, while the laboring moon 
Eclipses at their charms." 

The follows a description of the "formidable 
shape" guarding the other side of the gate — 
more sublimely horrible still. The one shape was 
— Sin. The other was her offspring — Death. 
"Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." 
They were both children of the devil. 

"By their fruits ye shall know them:'' And 
when you see the fruits of sin in the earth and 
realize its movement in your own life, even super- 
ficially, surely the conviction is forced upon you, 
however meager the beholding, that sin is the 
most awful, horrible and frightfully deformed 
thing in the universe. 

Sin and the devil are the very antipodes of all 
that God is. And its blighting and damning pres- 
ence, through the long and sorrow-laden history 
of our poor, sin-cursed race, is but a faint revela- 
tion of its possibilities. 

Dark and repellant are the "fruits of the flesh" 
when contrasted with those of the Spirit by the 
Apostle in Gal. V. And this, too, when viewed 
at long range from within the precincts of Chris- 
tian society and Christian homes. Darker and 

32 



OoVs TKHas ©ut 



more horrible are they when beheld in volcanic 
activity and in all their revolting shamelessness 
and cruelty in pagan lands and in the "submerged 
tenth" of Christian lands. Yet all this is bright- 
ness when contrasted with the conditions which 
would be realized, even in this world, were it not 
for the restraining and universally operative in- 
fluences of the Spirit of God. "But for the grace 
of God there goes John Bradford," said an old 
minister, pointing to a condemned criminal on 
his way to the gallows. 

But enough. What say you ? Looking at it as 
a want of inner conformity or as actual trans- 
gression, or in the light of its hideous deformity 
as the offspring of the devil, in utter and eternal 
antagonism to God, can you do aught else than 
fall prostrate before Him, saying in humble con- 
fession, "I am a sinful man, O Lord." 

3 



33 



CHAPTER III. 

GUII/f, CONDEMNATION, POLLUTION. 

According to the law, then, and the evidence 
converging upon you from various sources, it is 
concluded and you yourself conclude, that you 
are a sinful and sinning soul. There must be 
pronounced upon you the word which has been 
so frequently awaited, in earthly courts, with 
bated breath, — the word "Guilty." 

But in your case it is so much the more serious 
and awful a matter by so much as the heavens are 
higher than the earth. You are not simply guilty 
before one or more of your fellows, with its con- 
sequent temporal results, but, as the Apostle says, 
you are "guilty before God." This involves re- 
sults which are eternal and terrible beyond the 
power of your imagination to conceive. And you 
have nothing to answer for yourself in view of 
the declaration "that every mouth may be 
stopped." Guilty, guilty, echoes through your 
soul as all your faculties confirm the decision of 
the All-seeing One. 

There may be a natural impulse to flee — to hide 

34 



Gob's Was ®ut 



yourself. Adam, under the consciousness of his 
guilt, was thus moved. "And the Lord God called 
unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou ?" 

"And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, 
and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid 
myself." 

And from this initial exhibition of the impulse 
and its failure, the same is true onward through 
the sacred record, until in Revelation the very 
madness of this despairing desire is voiced in the 
cry,— as mountains and rocks are apostrophised — 
"Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that 
sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the 
Lamb." 

As to any hope you might have of a successful 
escape by flight from the pursuing justice of your 
fellowmen, what will it avail, when you have to 
do with him who says : "Though they dig into hell 
thence shall mine hand take them; though they 
climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them 
down: 

And though they hide themselves in the 
top of Carmel, I will search and take them out 
thence ; and though they be hid from my sight in 
the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the 
serpent, and he shall bite them." 

The consciousness of guilt — what a millstone on 
the elasticity of your life ! For many another be- 



35 



Oo&'s TKHas <S>ut 



sides the Thane of Cawdor has it "murdered 
sleep." The sense of it drove Judas and many 
another to self-destruction. To carry such a 
skeleton around with you — ah me! How it will 
mar the brightness of life and eat as doth a 
canker. The whole tendency and influence thereof 
is to convert you into a suspicious, nervous cow- 
ard, when otherwise you would be a courageous, 
free, aggressive soul. Look at the brethren of 
Joseph, recognizing in their guilty souls the seem- 
ing harshness of the latter as an avenging Neme- 
sis for their old time crime. "And they said one to 
another, we are verily guilty concerning our 
brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul, 
when he besought us, and we would not hear; 
therefore is this distress come upon us." And 
again, after the burial of their father, — notwith- 
standing the whole-hearted assurances of good- 
will already so freely granted by Joseph and 
abundantly attested by kindly deeds — their guilt 
arose, like Banquo's ghost, to disturb their peace. 
"And when Joseph's brethren saw that their 
father was dead, they said, Joseph will perad- 
venture hate us, and will certainly requite us all 
the evil which we did unto him." 

Its conscious presence has over and over again 
been such a fire in the bones, burning in the soul 
like a veritable hell — which by anticipation it was 



36 



&ob'8 Ma^ Out 



— that it has driven men to give themselves over 
to justice rather than endure the awful inner 
agony. 

And you are not only guilty, but the same is in- 
tensified and aggravated because of the light of 
knowledge in the face of which you are what you 
are. If the Apostle could affirm that those who 
enjoyed simply the light of nature — the bedimmed 
relevations of the law written in their hearts — 
were yet without excuse, how much more, when, 
in addition, you have the written law of the Lord, 
the Scriptures of truth, in which "life and immor- 
tality are brought to light." And not only have 
them but you have seen them illustrated in the 
lives of saintly men and women — the light of God 
shining round about you in manifold ways. You 
stand forth, as a sinner in the face of unnumbered 
blessings, and the fact deepens the fatefulness 
of the word "guilty" as you hear it in the solemn 
stillnesses of the soul. 

But being guilty what then? The sense or 
consciousness of guilt, brought home to you by 
manifold evidence from without and within, — 
is that the end of it? Justice forbids. That is 
neither according to human law, which may err, 
nor after the manner of the divine, which cannot. 
There must follow the condemning words of the 
judge. Sentence is pronounced and while it may 



37 



Go&'s TKHay ©ut 



not be executed immediately, or speedily, as we 
reckon duration on earth, yet the day of its full 
visitation draweth nigh. One man is impressed 
with these great verities and inquires as to how 
they may be averted — how life may take the place 
of death. Another, as Solomon says, "Because 
sentence against an evil work is not executed 
speedily, therefore his heart is fully set in him to 
do evil." 

But now we will consider whether there be any 
ray of hope shining in the darkness, and encour- 
aging you to believe that either the legal declara- 
tion of your guilt may be averted, or, failing in 
that, that then the sentence may be modified or 
neutralized. There are various possibilities in 
this connection, so far as an earthly tribunal is 
concerned. May they also be entertained in re- 
lation to the divine ? By one or the other of them, 
or all combined, the earthly hope may be indulged 
that you may not be adjudged guilty. Even while 
self-condemned, but innocent at the bar of public 
opinion and before the law, there may yet be pres- 
ent the hope and belief that detection may be 
abidingly averted. The person is continuously 
on guard to keep the veil of secrecy drawn be- 
tween the crime and the possible avenger. 

But I need not wait to dwell on the futility of 
such a hope or effort when you have to do — not 



38 



(Soft's Was <§>ut 



with man but with God. "Neither is there any 
creature that is not manifest in his sight, but all 
things are naked and open unto the eyes of him 
with whom we have to do." But, being detected, 
there may still remain the hope and possibility of 
freedom. This stimulates to strenuous effort. 
There may, for example, exist such social rela- 
tions and ties between the accused and influential 
persons in various walks of life, outside of legal 
circles as well as within, that the force of their 
influence may suffice to avert the sentence. The 
same may be true, as it frequently has been, on 
the score of financial ability — either on the part 
of the culprit himself or that of his friends. "The 
rich man's wealth is his strong city : the destruc- 
tion of the poor is their poverty." This condition 
has served to defeat the ends of justice and has, 
time and again, furnished a prop to the hope of 
offenders. So also has political influence fur- 
nished the lever by which those really guilty have 
yet been declared innocent and have gone unwhipt 
of justice. There is always present the possibility 
that, in view of the erring frailties of everything 
human, one may be adjudged guilty — being inno- 
cent. And likewise that one may be declared in- 
nocent — being guilty. 

In such a case conscious innocence on the one 
hand, in the gloom of dungeons, may fill the soul 

39 



Oo&'s TPdla^ Out 



with the serenity of heaven. Witness Paul and 
Silas in the Philippian jail. On the other hand, 
conscious guilt, amid the freedom and amenities 
of the outer world, may torture the soul with the 
very elements of future torment. But however 
any or all of these possibilities may hold, or not, 
before man, of what avail will they be before 
God ? You surely cannot hope to hide the fact of 
guilt from the All-seeing nor thus avert its dec- 
laration. And before him there is no possibility 
of comfort arising from injured innocence. 

But you are to regard yourself not only as 
guilty and condemned but also as polluted. Sin 
is an altogether vile and loathsome thing before 
God. Moral purity, wherever found, and in pro- 
portion to its presence, shrinks from it. You are 
not only guilty of an offense against the laws of 
God, in view of which you are condemned, but 
you have thereby rendered yourself unfit for, and 
disinclined from, association with what is pure 
and holy. "What concord hath Christ with 
Belial? and what fellowship hath righteousness 
with unrighteousness ? and what communion hath 
light with darkness ?" 

Were it possible to throw open the gates of 
heaven for your entrance, while thus polluted, 
you would either not enter, or, if you did, your 
vileness would be so borne in upon you in view 

40 



©ob's TKHas ©ut 



of its purity, that you would flee therefrom as 
from a place of torment. Like Judas you would 
have to go to "your own place" and that place 
would not be heaven. It is this element of the un- 
fitness for the society of God which presents the 
deepest shadows in the awful hopelessness of 
your future. 

Sin's loathsome vileness in the sight of God 
you may realize when you consider the frequency 
with which, under various figures, the sacred 
writers dwell upon it. 

Now it is exhibited as a violation of the purity 
of the marriage relation and branded with the 
name of spiritual adultery. Or again, of the ruin- 
ation of character and the blasting of earthly 
hopes by sensual indulgence, before entering the 
holy estate of wedlock. And so the prophets with 
awful energy and solemnity dwell at length upon 
the vileness, the unnaturalness, the waywardness, 
the folly, the ingratitude of those guilty of 
spiritual adultery and fornication. The conse- 
quences to themselves would be lamentable. 

Then again we have it figured under the aspect 
of that loathsome disease — the leprosy. "It was 
polluting, spreading (in respect to the person af- 
fected), transmissive and incurable by any known 
remedy. It was therefore the standing symbol of 
sin, the most malignant evil in God's universe." 



4i 



Oofc's Has ©ut 



Or, look again at the marvellously vivid picture 
of its vileness which Paul places before us in 
Rom. VII. The intensity of his own realization 
of it extorted the cry, "O wretched man that I 
am ! Who shall deliver me from this body of 
death?" Some have understood the Apostle as 
here referring to the ancient punishment of 
fastening a dead body to a living one. In that 
event you will realize more vividly the unutter- 
able abomination attaching to sin as an element 
hateful to God and to a soul spiritually renewed. 
How you would shrink from such an oppressive 
and loathsome presence. You bury your dead out 
of your sight because of these things. But to 
think of carrying about with you such vileness 
and to be holding fellowship with death ! 

This aspect of sin is involved in the prayers 
found in the Scriptures and in the devotional 
literature of the Church in all ages, as well as in 
the direct declaration of the Bible. "Create in 
me a clean heart, O God.'' 

"Nothing in my hand I bring; 

Simply to Thy cross I cling; 
Naked, come to Thee for dress; 

Helpless, look to Thee for grace; 
Foul, I to the Fountain fly; 

Wash me, Saviour, or I die." 

"Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees, hypo- 
42 



©o6'0 Mas ©ut 



crites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, 
which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are 
within full of dead men's bones and of all un- 
cleanness." And so of the saints regarding them- 
selves, "Behold I am vile, what shall I answer 
thee?" 

The nearer you are to God in character the 
more hateful does sin appear. The nearer to God 
the larger and keener will be the vision of self. 
Sin will be revealed to you in such guise as to 
compel confessions, which, to those who are 
strangers to such fellowship and self-revealings, 
may seem to indicate either gross self-deception 
or a worse moral condition than their own. But 
not so. It is only the difference between natural 
and spiritual discernment or between degrees of 
the latter — the difference between the microscope 
and the unaided eye. 

And if, with our limited apprehension, it is 
yet possible to so behold its nature, tendencies and 
results, in ourselves and others, as to regard it 
with unutterable loathing, what think you must 
be the attitude toward it of Him whose vision 
grasps all its hideous possibilities from beginning 
to end? 

You lift the covering from some place shut 
out from the sunlight. And you are startled at 
the revelation. There are dwellers in darkness 



43 



(Bob's Was <S>ut 



there. And they are startled too. Repulsive and 
slimy forms, mayhap — how they wriggle, writhe 
or scurry hither and thither as best they may. 

In the light of God let your heart be uncovered 
and there will be startling revelations. What 
horror of soul when the searchlights of God are 
turned upon the inner corruption and the creeping 
things of sin stand revealed. In the view of it 
you stand afar off, consciously unfit for fellow- 
ship with the Holy One. You cry "unclean, un- 
clean." 

Guilty, condemned, polluted, as you are sinking 
in the horrible pit and miry clay, you cry, "God 
be merciful to me a sinner." "What must I do?" 
To such a cry the ears of Him who delighteth in 
mercy will not be heavy that they cannot hear, 
nor will his hand be shortened that it cannot 
save." 



44 



CHAPTER IV. 

PENAI, results (certainty). 

Being guilty, polluted, condemned, you then 
must face the question of punishment. Your 
spiritual character and state being and remaining 
what it is there is no possibility of avoiding the 
retributions of the future. "The soul that sinneth 
it shall die." "Though hand join in hand the 
wicked shall not go unpunished." 

Leaving other phases of this question to be con- 
sidered in the chapters that follow, let us inquire 
at present concerning its certainty. 

As to the possibility of your avoiding it, the 
same considerations which were suggested in the 
last chapter for that purpose, regarding your 
guilt and condemnation, will also apply here. You 
will remember that such possibilities as hiding, 
or fleeing, or the effective intervention of others 
through social, financial, or political influence, 
were considered, and had to be set aside as utterly 
futile before God. There being absolutely no 
well-grounded hope in that direction, so far as 
your being found guilty and condemned, so also 

45 



Gob's TldaE ©ut 



is there none from these so far as the averting of 
future punishment is concerned. While this 
might be sufficient to reveal the hopelessness and 
pitiable helplessness of your spiritual plight, yet 
there are one or two additional possibilities, which 
may be taken into account. But they only help to 
deepen the dark shadows of despair which exclude 
the vision of any possible avenue of escape. They 
are adduced here because apparently they have a 
more especial bearing on the possible avoidance 
of punishment than upon that of a legally pro- 
nounced guilt or condemnation. 

Some have, for example, sought to avert or 
forestall the suffering of the penalty pronounced 
by the state by the commission of suicide. A very 
futile subterfuge it is true, but one by which they 
imagine to cheat the state or defeat justice as 
to the letter and conserve, in their own estimation, 
the question of their honor. But whatever was 
or was not gained or averted by self-destruction, 
in such a case, the fact still remained that life had 
to be given up to satisfy the offended majesty of 
law. The escape was more imaginary than real. 
What did it boot that the exit from life was by 
some self-applied agency rather than by that of 
the halter of the state, so long as the forced exit 
which the law demanded had to be endured ? But 



46 



(Bob's Ma^ ©ut 



even that poor consolation will be denied you as 
to the penalty for your sins. That which has been 
declared will surely come to pass in God's time 
and after the divine method, without any power 
of yours to delay or change. You may cheat the 
state as to the method of your exit, or the time 
thereof, or both. But you cannot annihilate your 
spirit. You must abide the sentence of the Al- 
mighty. 

Then again, you may, so far as earthly offenses 
and their results are concerned, be living in a 
community where, for capital offenses, capital 
punishment is not inflicted. You do not in this 
case, escape the visitation of penalty, but what 
may be deemed a less severe form thereof is your 
portion. 

Or, while capital punishment may be the law 
for the crime of which you are guilty, you may 
yet escape it by its being commuted to something 
else. In either case the death penalty is avoided. 
But not so in the realm of the spirit. "The soul 
that sinneth it shall die.'' The offense is capital 
and so also is the punishment. And there is no 
commutation. It is true that in the experience of 
the death penalty one may suffer more than an- 
other — both on account of the nature of his own 
mental and physical constitution, as well as from 



47 



Gob's TKHaE <§>ut 



the positive methods of its infliction. For these 
reasons the pain may be of the most excruciating 
character in one instance while comparatively mild 
in another. But, in either case, the death sentence 
is visited. 

So also in the moral world. There is a revela- 
tion made of the fact that in the future world, 
while the death sentence has been passed and is 
visited upon ail against whom it is declared, yet 
the realization of it by some is not what it is in the 
experience of others. Some are beaten with 
"many stripes" and others with only "few," be- 
cause of the responsibilities of present life privi- 
leges or the absence of them. "To whomsoever 
much is given of him shall be much required." 
This gradation will hold as between the heathen 
world and the lands where the light of life has 
come. And within the latter, as between those 
surrounded with favoring conditions when com- 
pared with those whose surroundings are un- 
toward. To go into the future unsaved from a 
land where the radiant light of the gospel is shed 
from many sources, and, perchance, with many 
aggravating elements in view of unimproved 
opportunities, is to go where, in number and se- 
verity, the stripes will be very many. In any event 
and under all considerations it is a fact of awful 



©o&'s TKIlas <§>ut 



solemnity and it certainly awaits the unsaved 
without any hope of being averted or commuted. 

There are other reasons worthy of mention in 
view of which you might escape the infliction of 
the death penalty from man. 

There might be something in your own ante- 
cedent character so worthy as to commend you to 
the mercy of the court. The special act because 
of which you were exposed to the utmost severity 
of the law was in such violent contradiction to 
your past record that it led to a modification of 
the sentence by the judge. 

Or, in consideration of your youth, inexperi- 
ence, and the absence of an appropriate apprecia- 
tion on your part of the nature of the crime com- 
mitted, you may be more leniently dealt with than 
might otherwise be. 

Then there may be various extenuating ele- 
ments entering into the case, as also considera- 
tions arising from your relation to those depend- 
ent upon you, all of which may tell on the issue. 

The state itself may conclude to commute your 
sentence should you help it in securing the con- 
viction of other offenders by confessing your own 
offenses and telling what you know of theirs. 

All these may exist as to the deserved judg- 
ments of man but there is no room for them in the 



49 



Gob's Mas <S>ut 



court of God. "The soul that sinneth it shall die." 
"We know that what things soever the law saith, 
it saith to them who are under the law ; that every 
mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be- 
come guilty before God." 

A slender hope might exist because of a pos- 
sible custom, in view of which, at certain times, 
prisoners might be released. "Now at that feast 
the governor was wont to release unto the people 
a prisoner, whom they would." But there is no 
such custom in the history of the divine govern- 
ment. Were there, surely there would be a record 
of its exercise, for a glimmer of hope amid the 
gloom. Little hope for you, apart from the divine 
way of life, when the cup could not pass from the 
Son of God himself. 

But then in the earthly life, there may be some 
social upheaval in which a criminal may be fortu- 
nate enough to secure his liberty. Something, 
for example, like the events attendant upon the 
revolution in France in which the Bastile gave up 
the condemned. The ray of hope engendered by 
it may be very feeble and flickering, it is true. 

Or, there may be a social or political need call- 
ing for the help of the condemned. This has 
sometimes been the case when epidemics raged 
and those to render the offices of humanity were 
few. Condemned ones were given their liberty 



50 



©o&'s Mas ©ut 



and a chance for life on condition of ministering 
to the needs of the afflicted. 

So also in the necessities arising from pro- 
tracted sieges or wars the military ranks have 
been recruited from the ranks of the condemned. 
Liberty and life have thus at times come to those 
who were adjudged as forfeiting both. But what 
hope for such possibilities in the movements of 
the divine order? 

It has been the case that persons condemned 
and immured awaiting the execution of the sen- 
tence have yet, in one way or other, effected their 
escape. This is among the commonplaces of 
human history. It has been accomplished directly 
by their own skill or strength, or others have come 
to their rescue and wrought their deliverance 
with superior might. 

But surely it is not necessary to inquire whether 
this be possible for you in the realm of the spirit- 
ual. What canst thou do to break through the 
barrier of the divine government? 

And who, among the sons of men, will enter 
the lists in thy behalf to forcefully contend with 
the Almighty? 

Were such conflict initiated against an author- 
ity unjustly established and arbitrarily exercised, 
there might be present the sublimity of true hero- 
ism, even while experiencing the crushing re- 



5i 



Gob's Was ©ut 



suits of superior force. Such resistance would be 
an inspiration to others and a life so sacrificed 
would not go out in vain. 

But this is impossible in relation to God. "Shall 
not the judge of all the earth do right?" "Thy 
right hand is full of righteousness." "Justice 
and judgment are the habitation of thy throne." 
"The scepter of thy kingdom is a right scepter.'' 
Not only righteously established but lovingly ex- 
ercised for the good of the creature. "The law 
is holy and just and good." Whoever exclaims 
against it, either as to its nature or exercise, does 
so because these characteristics are not congenial 
to his own nature or in harmony with his conduct. 

There is neither any hope of victory in such a 
contest, with its attendant life and liberty, nor is 
there the presence of the comforting inspiration 
that the sacrifice of your life will have, at least, 
a halo of patriotic glory for yourself and not be 
fruitless for good as to others. 

Be a martyr for God and you will shine as the 
stars for ever and ever. 

Be a martyr against him and your candle will 
go out in darkness and the silence of a loveless 
oblivion will be your self-prepared portion. 

There is another alternative not to be over- 
looked. With it we close the consideration of 
this part of our inquiry. 

52 



Gob's IPHas <§>ut 



In an earthly court the judge may righteously 
condemn. And yet this sentence may afterward 
be set aside by the exercise of the pardoning 
power on the part of the executive. And this, 
too, independently of the righteousness of the con- 
demned one. His guilt remains. So also the 
justice of the sentence under which he is enduring 
the outraged law's penalty. But in the exercise of 
his prerogative the chief executive may extend 
pardon irrespective of the man's deserts. More 
than one Barrabas has thus gone forth to liberty 
and sin — unchanged in character. 

But this is impossible in the spiritual realm. 
To do so God would have to deny himself — his 
law being but the expression of what he is. To 
permit it to be trampled on, wthout upholdng its 
integrity and honor, would be to abdicate — and 
chaos and death would ascend the throne. But 
not so. There can be no reprieve until the utter- 
most farthing is paid. 

There is henceforth naught for you — in the ab- 
sence of a condemnation justly cancelled and of 
a life righteously obtained — but a "certain fearful 
looking for of fiery indignation" and a bondage, 
the most galling, amid seeming liberty. "Who 
through fear of death were all their life time sub- 
ject to bondage." 

If not this, then a more appalling condition still 

53 



OoVs Mas ©ut 



— even that of one guilty and condemned, moving 
forward with the ungrounded peace and assur- 
ance of self-ignorance and God-ignorance. The 
yawning abyss lies in the pathway, while the song 
of the deluded one is, "soul take thine ease, eat, 
drink and be merry." And possibily God is say- 
ing, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be re- 
quired of thee." 

"There is a time we know not when, 
A point we know not where, 
That marks the destiny of men 
To glory or despair. 

"There is a line by us unseen 

That crosses every path, 
The hidden boundary between 
God's patience and his wrath. 

"To pass that limit is to die, 
To die as if by stealth, 
It does not quench the beaming eye, 
Or pale the glow of health. 

"The conscience may be still at ease, 
The spirits light and gay, 
That which is pleasing still may please 
And care be thrown away. 

"But on that forehead God has set 

Indelibly a mark 
Unseen by men; for men as yet 
Are blind and in the dark. 

54 



Gob's Ha]? <§>ut 



"Oh ! where is this mysterious bourne 
By which our path is crossed? 
Beyond which God himself hath sworn 
That he who goes is lost. 

"How far may we go on in sin? 
How long will God forbear? 
Where does hope end and where begin 
The confines of despair? 

"An answer from the skies is sent 
— Ye that from God depart 
While it is said 'To-day — repent 
And harden not your heart.' " 



CHAPTER V. 

PENAL RESULTS (NATURE). 

Being shut up to punishment for sin without 
any hope of escape then the question of its nature 
assumes deep interest. Whether it may or may 
not be of such a character as to justify the in- 
tensest apprehension — this will have a determin- 
ing effect on your attitude towards sin here and 
its results in the hereafter. If, in your estimation, 
there be not much to fear, then the "pleasures of 
sin" though they be but "for a season" may se- 
cure your devotion. If, on the other hand, it be 
revealed to you as appalling beyond present con- 
ception, then sin's fascination may be broken and 
your otherwise indifference under declared con- 
demnation, may be turned into the keenest solici- 
tude. 

That it is of such a nature as to justify your 
alarmed interest and arouse your deepest and con- 
tinued fear, will, I trust, be readily seen and ap- 
preciated when you soberly consider some of its 
elements. 

You are to regard these as embracing not only 

56 



<3ofc's TOlay ©ut 



penal results which are the natural and inevitable 
outgrowth of sin, but also, in addition, others 
which are to be positively or immediately in- 
flicted. 

Then, too, you are not to be unmindful that, 
while your soul is the chief factor in your person- 
ality you are yet the possessor of a body which, 
in some form, will continue to be a part of you 
in your future existence. This will be a sharer, 
after its kind, in the deplorable issues of your 
present life as a sinner. All of those, then, you 
must not, by any means, overlook, when you esti- 
mate the nature and possibilities of future suffer- 
ing in view of sin. Any one of them would be 
appalling enough, but, taken in combination, their 
effect should be to lead you with irrepressible and 
undying earnestness to inquire, "What must I 
do?" 

It is said of" Judas that he went to "his own 
place." And he is called the "Son of perdition." 
There is a place, then, where sinners gravitate in 
harmony with their nature. Their repulsions and 
affinities are such that they determine of them- 
selves what the future destiny is to be. So long 
as these remain, that destiny could not be other 
than it is. No mere arbitrary change of place 
would work a reversal of condition. On the 
contrary it might the rather intensify the pain- 



57 



(Bob's TKHas <S>ut 



ful elements of the untoward estate. In a city you 
find houses of an immoral character gravitating to 
their kind in certain quarters and streets. And 
the inner degradation tends more and more to be 
reflected in their material and visible surround- 
ings. Over all is written "Unclean, unclean." 
Now it would make no difference to arbitrarily 
change their location. Put them amid the pure 
and palatial and the blight of their presence would 
soon be seen in externally degraded and degrading 
transformations. Take one such and plant it 
amid influences and associations, righteous and 
holy and true, and the consequent restraint would 
become irksome and lead to shiftings where the 
sorry comfort of a common wretchedness might 
be realized amid more congenial surroundings 
and companions. It was their own place. 

And, as here, so in the life beyond. The mor- 
ally polluted, the souls alienated from God by sin, 
will, in the very nature of things, and by choice, 
gravitate away from fellowships which are holy. 
They will each go, by a selection according to 
natural law, to "their own place." In the future 
were such souls arbitrarily placed amid holy 
associations, their moral repulsions would only 
intensify their pain by the ever present and 
wretched consciousness of being "out of place." 
While there are places called hell and heaven, 

58 



<3oVs Mas 0\xt 



yet the elements of pain characteristic of the one 
and of pleasure as to the other would measurably 
companion souls independently of location. They 
could not deny themselves nor flee from their 
fixed nature, so that, in a measure, hell and heaven 
would be wherever they were. 

But look now at some of the penal elements 
naturally making up this inner hell which will 
torture you in your lost future estate. They will, 
of course, be mainly of a mental or spiritual 
nature. 

One of the most painful, we may believe, will 
be the working of an accusing conscience. It sits 
in judgment on our appetites, lusts, passions, 
choices, — all our inner as well as manifested life 
— and, in the light of an immutable standard of 
righteousness, declares them to be sinful or holy. 
There results the consciousness of guilt or inno- 
cence, condemnation or approval, along with 
varying emotions of pleasure or pain. These 
emotions will be more or less lively and effective 
in their results according to the vigor with which 
the conscience works as well as the clearness of 
the revelation made to the soul of that standard 
according to which the decisions of conscience are 
rendered. 

There may, it is true, be a dimness for a time 
on all the glory of this vicegerent of God in your 

59 



OoVe Ma^ ©ut 



soul and upon the eternal law of righteousness 
before whose bar its office is to bring you. You 
may hear its voice but faintly. You may see the 
law but dimly. And to what you do hear and 
see you may give but little heed. Thus for a little 
while here you may pursue your course in com- 
parative comfort. It may even, amid the bondage 
of corruption and a life altogether out of harmony 
with the law of righteousness, permit you to say 
"Soul take thine ease." So said the fool, who, 
shortly after, had his eyes opened in hell, "being 
in torment." 

But, usually, it is more or less awake and 
active in the performance of its divinely assigned 
duty. And, in that event, its decisions, in varying 
degree, breathe through the soul the sweetness, 
the comfort, the health, the joy of a conscious 
inner harmony, or, on the other hand, of an an- 
archy where the dove of peace cannot abide. This 
may be and frequently is so realized that the 
"peace of God which passeth all understanding 
keeps the heart and mind" as a foretaste of the 
heaven that is to be. So also may there be such 
an awful inner sense of warfare with righteous- 
ness, breeding in the soul such fearful elements 
of unrest as are veritable forerunners of the end- 
less gnawings and quenchless burnings of the hell 
that is yet to be. 

60 



©ofc's Was ©ut 



And this, too, depends not so much on the 
actual unrighteousness of which you may be 
guilty as upon the keenness of your insight into 
the spiritual nature, workings, and applications 
of the divine law. Sometimes the veil has been 
lifted and an exceptional revelation has been made 
to men of themselves, of their inner want of 
harmony with God, of their antagonism to the 
divine, of the length and breadth and height and 
depth of the law as it swept the inner departments 
of their being within the compass of its applica- 
tions. As the result, they were so grasped and 
shaken by it as to writhe and groan in awful 
agony of spirit. And yet, so far as actual, mani- 
fested sins were concerned, their lives were clean 
as compared to others, who, in the absence of this 
inner revelation, were going forward in sin with 
thoughtless levity. 

And if this be so amid the imperfect revela- 
tions of self, of law, of conscience, in the life that 
now is, you may well pause appalled at the awful 
possibilities of the future world. You shall there 
stand forth under the blazing consciousness of 
what you really are as a sinner, of what sin truly 
is, of the way in which God regards it, of the law's 
grasp upon your whole being and the consequent 
unintermitting lashings of a now fully aroused 
and unerring conscience. Under a very imperfect 

61 



(Bob's Mas <§>ut 



measure of these things here men have tossed 
restlessly upon their pillows, sleep has departed, 
appetite has forsaken them, they have fled as if 
pursued by chastising scorpions, health has broken 
down, insanity has been engendered, and, in order 
to escape this damnation of hell upon earth, they 
have voluntarily surrendered themselves to the 
"powers that be" to suffer for crimes of which 
they themselves alone had knowledge. Well, 
then, in view of it, with what awful significance 
is the query of God, by the prophet, clothed: 
"Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be 
strong, in the days that I shall deal with thee?" 

When the Lord fights against you with the 
"sword of his mouth," as he has affirmed he will, 
then what canst thou do? The sword of his 
mouth is his word and to suffer the piercings of 
that will be awful beyond expression. 

Words are expressive of spirit life. And what 
are any and all other forces as compared with 
that of spirit ? Nothing can wound or work such 
terrible wretchedness and desolation as a war 
in which the combatants and blows are all spirit- 
ual — inflicted by the tongue, the pen or the press. 
Here a word is spoken, and it enters another 
soul, rankling, festering and making it feverish 
with the fire of hell. And the outcome may be the 
utter blasting of happiness, the kindling of such 

62 



GoVs Map <S>ut 



fires as will bring ruin to the one who spoke it as 
well as to the one in reference to whom it was 
spoken. 

You draw this sword of the mouth in destruc- 
tive warfare, and reputations are blasted, char- 
acter beclouded, hearts crushed, and the dark, 
damp air of despair settles down upon some other- 
wise sunny, domestic hearthstone. 

You draw this sword, and in its use there is 
conjured up from the great deep such hosts of 
black and malignant things as torture souls, and 
make demons exult in the carnival of misery. 

You draw this sword, and in its use friends are 
separated, love is supplanted by hate, domestic dis- 
cord enters where peace reigned, neighbors are at 
variance, churches are rent asunder, counten- 
ances illumined by the sunshine of life become 
changed into blackness, hearts quiver with pain, 
life becomes a charnel house, filled with the dead 
and dying elements of old joys — a burden so 
grievous that relief is often sought in the silence 
of the tomb. All this and more of tragedy is 
found among men, because they fight against each 
other with the swords of their mouths. 

Now if this be so even with the swords of our 
mouths, what, think you, must it be with the 
sword of God's mouth? Amid the heart lacera- 
tions suffered from these cruel human mouth- 



63 



GoVs THUas ©ut 



swords, one may have the consolation arising from 
the assurance that they are undeserved. The an- 
swer of a good conscience will be a well-spring of 
life, bringing refreshment of spirit amid the fires. 
You may find refuge in the consideration that the 
sword of this, that or the the other person's mouth 
is being used either through ignorance or malice. 
And, in either case, this will tend to reinforce your 
powers of heroic endurance. But when it is God 
that fights against one with the sword of his 
mouth — then it is another matter. It is one filled 
with awful elements. There is then absolutely 
no consolation to be derived from the answer of 
a good conscience. Neither can refuge be taken 
from its woundings in the thought that it proceeds 
from ignorance or malice. While writhing be- 
neath its piercings there is the ever-present con- 
sciousness that it is deserved. The force of 
infinite knowledge, spotless holiness, and flawless 
justice is behind it. Where, then, can the soul go? 
To what refuge can it flee ? It has to stand forth 
in a state of naked defenselessness, while suffer- 
ing the awful piercings of the sword of the Al- 
mighty. In the face of this let me ask again: 
"Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be 
strong, in the days that I shall deal with thee?" 
And then, too, memory will undoubtedly be an 
active element contributing to the wretchedness 



64 



Govs Map <§>ut 



of your future estate. There will be abiding by 
trooping forth from its chambers the procession 
of all the possibilities of the earth life by which, 
if improved, your now miserable lot could have 
been avoided. These will be individually point- 
ing their ringers of condemnation at you and you 
will writhe unavailingly under the pain of their 
lash and sting. 

Even in this life, with all its remedial possibil- 
ities and actualities, how much pain is engendered 
by memories which you would fain erase forever. 
In the effort to drown these men may resort to 
the wine cup or rush into the feverish pursuit of 
this life's fitful pleasures. And by such effort 
they not only fail to escape from these pursuing 
furies but are sowing the seeds for a larger har- 
vest of accumulated sorrow in the coming years. 

Here, there is the possibility of healing, of de- 
liverance, so that even such memories may be 
changed into ministers of grace, chastened by 
their passage through manifold divine mercies and 
leading one into the satisfying joys found in the 
fruitful vales of humility. 

But in the hereafter those remedial possibilities 
are no more. Instead of becoming messengers 
leading by the divine ordering to light and love 
and life, thy will be transformed into hideous and 
hissing serpents of retribution beneath whose 



65 



Gob's TPdlas <S>ut 



woundings will be ceaselessly engendered dark- 
ness, hate and death. 

"While memory watches o'er the sad review 
Of joys that faded like the morning dew." 

You will there have memories of multiplied op- 
portunities, of available privileges, scattered free- 
ly along the pathway of your earthly life, which, 
if you had seized and used aright, would have led 
into paths of righteousness and peace. 

So, also, on the other hand, memories of sins 
which might have been forsaken, of temptations 
which might have been overcome, of evil habits 
which might have been broken. Memories of 
invitations to choose the better part which passed 
unheeded and of warnings to turn aside from the 
paths of sin which were scorned. With what 
mighty significance will these now be clothed 
when they will be ceaselessly bearing down upon 
you amid the awful revealings of eternity. 

Ah tHe everlasting regret over the joy, the 
pleasure, the blessedness which might have been, 
as contrasted with the pain that is. And the fear- 
ful agony of despair that will possess the spirit 
amid the dark shadows of its ever-deepening night 
of sorrow. Through a railroad bridge tender's 
neglect the "draw" was not in place when a pas- 
senger train was due. It made the fatal plunge. 

66 



GoV$ Was <§>ut 



Many lives were lost. When the watchman was 
at last found he was hopelessly insane and kept 
ceaselessly exclaiming "Oh, if I only had," "Oh, if 
I only had." What an array of "only hads" and 
of "might have beens" will arise in memory to 
torment you in eternity ! 

And then to realize that you cannot banish 
them — that over all ways by which you would 
flee, the fact, if not the words, inscribed over the 
entrance to Dante's Inferno, "Abandon hope all 
ye who enter here" will drive you back to your 
awful companionship. 

But in addition to the dread fellowship held 
with yourself, of what will be within you, there 
will also be that without you — the hateful asso- 
ciations of other lost souls and of devils. 

You have perhaps known families from whose 
hearths love had largely taken its flight. What a 
wretched home life or the absence of it resulted. 
Homes they certainly were not if "home is where 
the heart is." And there is no love in hell. Love 
is of God. It is not of the devil. And everything 
there will be Satanic. You will hate every one 
and every one will hate you. Just imagine your- 
self abidingly in this life, in the company of the 
vilest and the wickedest social elements. Suppose 
your daily fellowships were with those who know 
not God but blaspheme his holy name, who take 



67 



Oofc's Was ©ut 



pleasure in desecrating his holy day, who violate 
all filial obligations, who are murderers, adulter- 
ers, thieves, liars, and full of all covetousness. 
How your soul would shrink and be filled with 
loathing and unutterable horror. Unless — unless 
— your soul at the same time would also be filled 
with an abounding, pitying, compassionate love 
for them. Then you might endure. But that is 
just the element, the presence and exercise of 
which will be utterly absent from all the relations 
of the lost with each other. "Hateful and hating 
one another." And moreover the most hateful 
exhibitions of the fallen nature of man here are 
tame as compared to those which will break forth 
when the visible and invisible restraints of this 
life are removed. 

The outook as to companionship in hell, both 
internal and external, is such as should cause your 
soul to shrink fearfully from those unspeakable 
horrors. You should cry for an assured deliv- 
erance therefrom and seek it with an earnestness 
that can know no abatement until you have a well 
grounded hope and assurance that your compan- 
ionship in eternity will be that of light and love. 

A profound and beautiful saying of Augus- 
tine's is "Lord, thou hast made us for thee, and 
our heart is disquieted till it resteth in thee." You 
have wandered from God. The fact and con- 



OoVs TKHas ©ut 



sciousness of his loving Fatherhood has ceased. 
But the need of it forever abides. And in view 
of the ever present need and the ever absent sense 
of sonship the heart is restless. There is an in- 
ner, a deep, abiding and unsatisfied soul yearning 
because of this orphanage. It has led and leads 
to the thousand and one vagaries, the world over 
and through all history, by which men would fain 
enter into rest. 

"0 where shall rest be found 
Rest for the weary soul?" 

This has been, is, and will be the mute or ex- 
pressed cry of the orphaned hearts of men be- 
cause of the loss of the divine fellowship through 
sin. To have your soul thus in its deepest needs, 
crying out for the living God, while at the same 
time you hate that God — ah me, what a warfare is 
this ! And to have this heritage of need, of con- 
scious orphanage, of hate, abide with you hope- 
lessly and unalterably in a world of outer dark- 
ness; while you are aware that others are made 
glad by a Father's presence and unspeakably 
blessed through the ministries of his love, amid 
the unceasing splendors of eternity ! This will be 
as a gnawing worm and a burning fire torturing 
your poor soul. 

Have you not seen the heart of a child so 

69 



©o&'s Was ©ut 



wrought upon by a father's frown that the little 
one shrank beneath it and slunk away in sorrow- 
ful wretchedness ? Its happiness came or went as 
the light of its father's countenance or the dark- 
ness thereof was lifted upon it. 

And if this be so in the human how much more 
so in the divine relation. The abiding conscious- 
ness of the soul in the future that, for it, the face 
of God is forever darkened — ah, as one whipped 
with scorpions, will it slink, and be slinking away 
from God farther and still farther into the hope- 
less hidings of the darkness and the abysses. And 
all this while thinking of what "might have been," 
what "might have been." 

Seek the world over for the vilest, the most re- 
pulsive, the most dangerous, the most hellish of 
social conditions. Then seek through all past time 
for the same. And when you conclude to award 
the crown somewhere and sometime for this bad 
eminence then reflect that even were the whole 
earth to be converted into a uniformity of bad- 
ness like unto it — that even then it would be a 
comfortable, endurable and pleasant place in 
which to abide as compared to the condition to 
be realized in perdition. 

Amid all the manifestations of the evil propen- 
sities of fallen men in this life the fact still re- 
mains that the Holy Spirit is everywhere present, 

70 



Gofc's TKftas <S>ut 



exercising such restraint, the world over, that 
men are not what they would be but for this Pres- 
ence. But as Louis XIV said regarding the so- 
cial and political possibilities imminent upon his 
demise, "After me the deluge," so might you say 
regarding the condition of men upon the final 
withdrawal of the Holy Spirit — then the deluge. 
And a deluge compared to which the worst effects 
of sin ever realized here might be endured with 
comfortable complacency. 

And, in addition to all these results and con- 
ditions, which are the natural attendants and is- 
sues of sin, there are intimations that there will 
be visited upon the lost, measures of positive pen- 
alty on account of it which will be a further mix- 
ture in the cup of misery which they are to drink. 

Composed, as they still will be, of body, as well 
as soul, both of these elements of their personality 
will endure, each after its kind, the measure of 
this ministry of punitive pain which is its due. 

This is not only suggested by all those figures 
referring in a concrete manner to punitive visita- 
tion but also by those which are not figurative. 

As to the former, passages affirming that the 
wicked shall be "cast into fire," "beaten with 
stripes," "visited with torment," and that upon 
them he "shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, 
and an horrible tempest" may be taken as in- 

7i 



GoVs TKHas Out 



dicative of the visitation of positive suffering upon 
the wicked over and above the natural results of 
sin. 

And, as to the latter, the Apostle's declaration 
that "indignation and wrath" are to be visited 
upon "every soul of man that doeth evil" is an 
intimation of the relation of divine justice to the 
wicked other than that of merely leaving them to 
the natural and inevitable issues of their sins. 

And as to what may be involved for each in 
this positive visitation of God for sin — who can 
tell? What heart can endure? "It is a fearful 
thing to fall into the hands of the living God" as 
a subject of wrath. In view of all the considera- 
tions of this chapter does not the import of the 
way of life grow exceedingly? As also of the 
question "what shall I do?" 



73 



CHAPTER VI. 
PENAI, rssui/ts (intensity). 

In addition to the certainty and nature of fu- 
ture punishment the fact of its intensity is not to 
be overlooked. Whether you suffer much or lit- 
tle is surely an important element in the considera- 
tion of the question. You are especially inter- 
ested in this because of certain advantages and 
privileges with which, above many, you are and 
have been favored. Should they pass unimproved 
they will make you peculiarity amenable, not only 
to future torment of the nature attempted to be 
described in the preceding chapter, but also char- 
acterized by an added intensity, because of and in 
proportion to, such favoring present conditions. 
That differences in this regard exist in the fu- 
ture world the Scriptures plainly affirm as, for 
example, the Lord's words in reference to the 
many or few stripes with which each will be visited. 

And this difference in the future lot of lost 
souls is made to hinge on variations of unim- 
proved advantages here. "That servant which 
knew his Lord's will and prepared not himself 

n 



(Bob's TPdas ©ut 



neither did according to his will, shall be beaten 
with many stripes." 

"But he that knew not and did commit things 
worthy of stripes shall be beaten with few stripes. 
For unto whomsoever much is given of him shall 
much be required: and to whom men have com- 
mitted much, of him they will ask the more." 

On this basis, while the condition of the heath- 
en may be less desirable than yours, so far as this 
life is concerned, yet, as to that of the life to come, 
it will be much more preferable. If I were to pass 
hence alienated from God, a stranger to the way 
of life, it were better for me to do so from pagan 
rather than from Christian environments. Bet- 
ter to go as a heathen, encumbered with the blind- 
ness engendered by the idolatrous traditions of 
ages, than to go from amid surroundings illum- 
inated by the Sun of Righteousness. 

It is true none are excused, as the Apostle so 
vividly, forcibly, and conclusively shows in his 
epistle to the Romans, chapters I, 2 and 3. 

The Jew had his special advantages, as the 
Apostle admitted and enumerated in reply to the 
query of a representative of that nationality. And 
so have you. But those advantages did not pre- 
vent the Apostle from bringing him in as "guilty 
before God" with the rest of mankind. 

The latter, without the law of God, as the Jew 



74 



OoVs Mas ©ut 



had and as you have it, was yet to perish without 
it for his sin. He was "without excuse" because 
of other sources of light than written law — bring- 
ing responsibility. So also will the Jew and you 
perish for your sin — being "without excuse" — in 
view of your possession not only of their sources 
of light but of others peculiar to yourselves. 

The advantages of the Jew were "much every 
way, chiefly that because unto him were com- 
mitted the oracles of God." And what has been 
committed unto you ? The oracles of God as well 
as unto him. Nay, more, to you as not unto him, 
has been granted the incomparable light shed upon 
the problems of life, death and immortality from 
the pages of the New Testament Scriptures. If 
it could be said by Paul concerning the Old Tes- 
tament writings, when addressing Timothy : "And 
that from a child thou hast known the Holy 
Scriptures which are able to make thee wise unto 
salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus" 
how much more is this possible with you when, in 
addition to the old you also have the new in your 
hands. In them, in a peculiar manner "life and 
immortality" are brought to light. 

"A glory gilds the sacred page, 
Majestic, like the sun; 
It gives a light to every age; 
It gives, but borrows none." 

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Oofc's Mas <S>ut 



Have you ever reflected, however cursorily, on 
the manifold ways in which the "goodness of 
God" which should "lead you to repentance" has 
distinguished you above others? They may be, 
and probably are, regarded by you as being so 
among the commonplaces of life, so among the 
matter-of-course things, that their inestimable 
preciousness has not taken serious hold upon your 
thought. But were you to be suddenly deprived 
of them and their whole influence in your life and 
in the social life about you to be rooted out and 
all become as though they had never been — what 
then? 

The freedom of aceess which you may have to 
some things and the abundant fullness of their 
supply may deaden your sense as to their exceed- 
ing value but nevertheless the value remains. 

As to the air, for example, which you may 
breathe so freely and the water which wells up so 
copiously for you. Received and used perchance 
by you thoughtlessly and thanklessly — but what if 
they were withheld for a little? What an awak- 
ening then to the unspeakable preciousness of 
otherwise common and mayhap little regarded 
blessings. Thus numberless facts, in a thought- 
less way lightly esteemed, among which you have 
been ''living and moving and having your being" 
from infancy onward, so that they have been con- 



76 



Gob's Was ©ut 



sidered as among the natural order of things — a 
birthright inheritance, legitimate and inalienable 
— are yet to be attributed to God's providential 
goodness and gracious favor. Their withdrawal 
would startle you into the sorrowful and disap- 
pointed realization that gold and silver and prec- 
ious stones had been strewn around you while 
yet you had been moving among them as though 
they were wood and hay and stubble. The fault 
is yours, not theirs. To awake to the vision of 
this — not in this life, but the next! Who can 
measure or declare the soul's awful sense of loss ? 
Recall and ponder some of these facts. 

The "oracles of God" pouring from the press 
by the million, to be obtained for a few cents, or, 
if need be, "without money and without price." 

The Sabbath, the Church, the proclamation of 
the way of life by the heralds of salvation, so that 
the sound thereof is familiar. 

Living illustrations of the presence and power 
of the life divine, in men and women in all the 
departments of social and business life. 

Coming into contact with it in the home, in the 
school, not absent from the activities of the secu- 
lar and flooding those of the sacred endeavors of 
men. 

Pressing round about you when you awake, 
offering companionship through the day and com- 

77 



(Bob's TKHa$ ©ut 



ing in the quiet stillnesses of the night, proffering 
the benediction and peace of communion with the 
invisible and holy. 

Wafted from the assemblies of the saints, as 
the songs of Zion are borne to you on the wings 
of the wind, intoned by the church bells, as they 
awaken the echoes among the valleys and hills and 
sound over the plains the call to worship God. 

Beaming upon you from the eyes of happy 
childhood and following you wistfully and com- 
passionately through all the garnered experiences 
of life's multiplied years. 

Its gentle voice penetrating the noisy Babels of 
earth and not absent from the great solitudes and 
silences, round about you amid the glare and glit- 
ter of this garish world's activities and encom- 
passing you when deep sleep falleth upon men and 
the solemn stillness of the starry immensities en- 
ters your soul. 

Touching its garments amid the jostling crowds 
and meeting it on every street and avenue of a 
literature the breath of whose life depends upon 
the inspiration issuing from the life of the Holy 
One. 

Memories of holy influences emanating from 
family altars, the stillness and heavenly quiet of 
Sabbath solemnities, the loving persuasiveness of 
example and precept, coming from hearts living 

78 



<3ofc's TKHas <§mt 



near to God and bearing you up in intercession be- 
fore the throne of grace. 

Through all the life of the modern world in 
growing measure — its life private, public, domes- 
tic, social, municipal, national, educational, relig- 
ious, its history, biography, science, art, philoso- 
phy — you have heard and are hearing voices de- 
claring the supreme value of the invisible and 
eternal, and proclaiming that over all there is One 
whose Kingship is to be acknowledged and before 
whom the whole being should bow in reverential 
worship and loyal, loving service. 

Now amid many, if not all, of these forces, 
making for righteousness, these influences which 
would woo you from sin's domain and draw you 
into the fellowships of the Kingdom of God, you 
have pursued the way of your earthly life with- 
out coming into the obedience of the truth, prac- 
tically indifferent to the claims of God and the 
solemnities of the eternal world. 

You finally pass hence from amid this galaxy 
of mercies, blessings, influences, this environment 
of light, all these gentle wooings of the things of 
the heavens. You have resisted them, closed your 
heart against them, made your choice of another 
service to their exclusion and with your back upon 
them you enter impenitently the world of the in- 
visible, the eternal, the irrevocable. And sud- 

79 



Gofc's TKRaE ©ut 



denly there is an awful awakening. An awaken- 
ing to just estimates and to the comparative 
values of two kingdoms and worlds. An awaken- 
ing accompanied with emotions — hard, hateful, 
impenitent, wrathful, despairing, because of the 
blindness, folly, insensibility, wickedness, which 
led you, amid all such golden opportunities and 
influences, to let them pass unheeded, while choos- 
ing darkness and death rather than light and life. 
You are filled with cursing. The intensity of the 
conscious contrast between what was and is and 
might have been, only fills your soul with a deeper 
sense of pain which will engulf you in unutterable 
wretchedness. 

Sin will then appear as an abominable, hateful, 
damning and damnable thing. You will loathe, 
condemn and hate yourself, as consciously antag- 
onistic to holiness and a holy God. You will curse 
the creator and every creature as well as yourself 
and yet you will realize and acknowledge the 
righteousness and justice of all that you are ex- 
periencing. 

According to the light of the present will be 
the blackness of the darkness beyond. According 
to the heights of unimproved opportunity and 
privilege will be the depths of misery into which 
you will plunge over there. According to the 
multiplicity of loving influences which, in this life, 

80 



Gob's Was ©ut 



would woo you to God, will be the intensity of 
your self-hatred and condemnation. According to 
the sweetness, purity and delightsomeness of your 
earthly life — made so for you because of the pres- 
ence and operation in others of holy principles — 
will there be an intensity of painful recoil when 
confronted with a condition from which all sweet- 
ness, purity and delight have gone and there is an 
onrush of all that is hateful and horrible. 

The comparative intensity, then, of the penal 
results awaiting you is an element in the case 
which should give you the most solemn and seri- 
ous pause. 

The Scriptures not only justify the worst fears 
which may be entertained as to this but set forth 
the awful possibilities in language that goes ut- 
terly beyond the present grasp of human appre- 
hension. 

If in reference to the joys awaiting the re- 
deemed it is said "Eye hath not seen, nor ear 
heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, 
the things which God hath prepared for them that 
love him," it is surely implied, by parity of rea- 
soning, that what awaits those who hate God is 
also beyond all present human conception. 

All the imagery borrowed from material things 
is indicative of this. The undying worm, the un- 
quenchable fire, the smoke of their torment, weep- 

6 

81 



OoVb W.&V ©ut 



ing and wailing and gnashing of teeth, the rain- 
ing upon the wicked of "snares, fire and brimstone 
and an horrible tempest," — what can all such 
imagery mean but the infliction and suffering of 
the penal consequences of sin, by the impenitent, 
in appalling intensity. Holy men of God were 
speaking as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, 
in reference to this, and not following cunningly 
devised fables. 



82 



CHAPTER VII. 

PENAL RESULTS (DURATION). 

On the subject of the penal results of your sins 
there still remains another element for your con- 
sideration. It is the most appalling of all. It is 
that of the duration of suffering in the world to 
come. In view of their certainty, nature and in- 
tensity do you inquire with earnest solicitude 
"what must I do ?'' There is surely enough and 
more than enough in those elements of the sub- 
ject to elicit such an inquiry. 

But when it comes to the question as to whether 
they are to be in the most absolute sense without 
limit as to duration — ah, that is an awful abyss, 
the possibility of which should arouse you to the 
most earnest and ceaseless inquiry and effort if 
peradventure there might be deliverance for you. 
Their certainty, nature and intensity possess ele- 
ments from which you are to recoil and flee as 
from an evil, overtopping in its manifold terrors 
the utmost conceptions of the heart of man. What 
an amazement of fear should then seize you when, 
in addition to the foregoing, it should be borne in 

83 



Oofc's May <§>ut 



upon you that from the grasp of these awful hor- 
rors there was to be no release "for ever and 
ever." This is the question that now confronts 
you. 

Appalling though the results of sin might be 
in the future as to their certainty, nature and in- 
tensity, yet were there a well-grounded hope that 
they would at length cease, even after the lapse 
of inconceivable periods, then there would be in- 
volved the possibility of measurably comfortable 
endurance. The "Pleasures of Hope" might be 
felt with alleviating power, even in hell, and your 
existence, in view of the eternity of blessedness 
to follow, would be a boon of unspeakable joy to 
you. 

But if it is to be otherwise — if no ray of hope is 
to penetrate the "blackness of darkness" that will 
envelope you, if your wretched estate is to go on 
and on and on, "world without end," then your 
existence will be an unspeakable curse of which 
you would fain rid yourself, but cannot. Under 
such a condition "good were it for you if you had 
never been born." 

The possibility of such a result is of too appall- 
ing a nature for you to face with nothing stronger 
to sustain you than a mere presumption that it 
may not be. To take any chances, to run any 
risk, where you have no well-grounded assurance 

84 



Gob's Mas ©ut 



that such an awful result will not be your portion, 
while at the same time it is possible for you to 
take such action here as will positively avert 
future evil, be it finite or infinite — surely that 
were the very madness of folly. 

Seek the way of life at all hazards, be the penal 
consequences of your sins in the future what they 
may. On any supposition they are dreadful 
enough. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the 
hands of the living God. For our God is a con- 
suming fire." 

But, in the event of their being unending, there 
is overwhelming reason for you to bestir your- 
self, to ask, to seek, to knock, to rest not until the 
danger be overpast. 

That this reason really does exist, that the 
worst fears you may entertain as to the duration 
of future punishment are well-grounded — I be- 
lieve to be a part of God's merciful revelation to 
you. Thus would he lead you to inquire the way 
of life, to flee for refuge to the hope set before 
you. There is such a hope, one which you may 
have as an "anchor of your soul, both sure and 
steadfast." 

For your belief in the unending consequences 
of sin in the future world and for action in har- 
mony therewith consider the following : 

It has been the faith of the church universal in 



85 



(Bob's Was ®nt 



all ages — both Jew and Gentile. And this unan- 
imity of belief, based on the Scriptures, argues a 
righteous understanding of the revelation. 

Moreover, this belief of the ancient church, in- 
stead of being opposed by our Lord and his 
Apostles was, on the other hand, confirmed most 
expressly. They set it forth much more clearly 
and explicitly than ever in terms which leave 
nothing to be desired. Take the following illus- 
trative passages, "It is better for thee to enter 
into life maimed, than, having two hands, to go 
into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched. 
Where their worm dieth not and the fire is not 
quenched." (Mark ix, 43, 44. "Depart from 
me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." "And these 
shall go away into everlasting punishment: but 
the righteous into life eternal." (Matt, xxv, 
4i, 46.) 

The same word being used in both clauses it 
follows that what is true of one is also true of the 
other. If the blessedness of the righteousness is 
to continue for ever, as is here affirmed and as no 
one denies, then, just as surely, the punishment 
of the wicked will be similarity without end. 

And the Apostolic teaching is in harmony with 
the foregoing express declarations of our Lord. 
The wicked are to be "punished with everlasting 



86 



Gob's Map ©ut 



destruction from the presence of the Lord and 
from the glory of his power." (2 Thess. 1 19.) 

Jude speaks of those for whom is "reserved the 
blackness of darkness for ever" and John, in 
Revelation, of those "the smoke of whose torment 
ascendeth up for ever and ever : and they have no 
rest day nor night." 

These will suffice for our purpose here. 

What a prospect is this ! Before such an out- 
look, in the presence of these solemnities of the 
eternal world, these partial revelations of a sin- 
ner's destiny — the certainty, nature, intensity and 
limitless duration of which are confirmed of God 
— surely the instinctive cry of your soul can but 
be "What must I do ?" In their presence no won- 
der the prophet cried "Who among us shall dwell 
with the devouring fire? who among us shall 
dwell with everlasting burnings?" 

Periods of duration which, to our present 
thought, appear overwhelming in their vastness, 
will dwindle into insignificance by comparison 
with what is still beyond. 

You may be impressed with the greatness of 
historic time. How far off, hazy, shadowy, indis- 
tinct, seem the men and things of the early Egyp- 
tian dynasties, of the movements on the plain of 
Shinar in the times of the dispersion, of that old 



87 



Oofc's Xima£ <§>ut 



world before the deluge, of the time when father 
Adam was still in Paradise keeping and dressing 
it. We speak of pre-historic times as of those so 
far removed that our notions of them bear the 
vagueness characteristic of our grasp of numbers 
indicated by seven or more figures. 

To be in pain and sorrow at the dawn of his- 
toric time and to be still enduring them might be 
deemed a fearful destiny. 

But what of this as compared to the lapse of 
geologic time? What is the six thousand years 
usually assigned to human history when you come 
to reckon years by the hundred million — as geolo- 
gists affirm must be done to account for the 
change of our earth from the original chaos to its 
present order ? 

To be in torment at the dawn of creation and 
to continue therein through those abysmal geo- 
logic periods up to the introduction of man — un- 
speakably deplorable! 

Astronomic distances are so vast that you could 
remove from the solar system until the whole 
diameter of the earth's orbit would be hidden be- 
hind a thread which itself would be invisible a few 
feet away. The earth's orbit would shrink into 
comparative nothingness — be as though it were 
not. And so of time. Viewing historic time from 
the dawn of geologic time the former might 



(Bofc's Mas ©ut 



shrivel or even vanish altogether and be as though 
it were not. 

But so also would geologic time itself shrivel 
and ultimately vanish when viewed from some 
point in the immensities of prior duration. And 
not alone of anterior duration but as well of that 
which is yet to be. Geologic time will recede until 
it be a mere speck on the unfolding scroll of 
eternity and ultimately disappear. 

But having vanished you are still on the thres- 
hold of eternity. This is forever before you. 

Take the following impressive illustration of 
time immensities which I recall having seen some- 
where. Suppose one grain or particle of this 
world were borne away at the present moment. 
Then a thousand years elapse and, at the end of 
that period, another grain is removed. Suppose 
this process were to continue — one grain removed 
each thousand years — until finally this world 
ceased to be. Can you grasp the vastness of such 
a duration? 

During its slow process and throughout its in- 
conceivable extension, sin's penal results will be 
endured. 

But even at the close thereof you will be but at 
the dawn of eternity. It will be forever ahead of 
you. Such periods multiplied by tens of thou- 
sands of others like them will vanish, be en- 



89 



6ofc's Was Qui 



gulfed in the past, be as though they were not, 
while through them all and on, on, on, forever on, 
the wretchedness of your sinful estate will be a 
present, an ever abiding reality. 

"I admit the awful nature of the conclusion, 
that the punishment of the future world is to have 
no end. I do most fully admit, that it is indeed 
'a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living 
God.' But what if I should doubt or deny it? 
Can this have any influence on that eternal 
Judge, who will pronounce my final sentence? 
None. Can my denial of what he has said, or my 
refusal to explain it in analogy with all his other 
declarations relative to things of the future world, 
or my efforts to fritter away the meaning of his 
declarations — can all this avail me, when I stand 
an unembodied, naked, helpless spirit before his 
searching eye and the tribunal of his almighty 
power? Oh, the dreadful thought ! What if I 
deceive myself, and cry out, 'peace! peace!' while 
my God saith, 'There is no peace to the wicked ?' 
Will this repeal his law, altar its meaning, or 
frustrate its penalty? It is indeed a fearful haz- 
ard for men to cast themselves for safety on such 
a desperate wreck as this !" 

"I must hold to the endless punishment of the 
wicked, or give up the endless happiness of the 
righteous. And if the hope of this must be aban- 

90 



Gob's Mas ©ut 



doned, then may we well ask, what the gospel has 
revealed that is worth our knowing, or of what 
value is the existence which the Creator has given 
us." 

"The result seems to me to be plain, and philo- 
logically and exegetically certain. It is this: 
either the declarations of the Scriptures do not 
establish the facts, that God and his glory and 
praise and happiness are endless, nor that the hap- 
piness of the righteous in a future world is end- 
less ; or else they establish the fact, that the pun- 
ishment of the wicked is endless. The whole 
stand or fall together. There can from the very 
nature of antithesis, be no room for rational 
doubt here, in what manner we should interpret 
the declarations of the sacred writers. WE 
MUST EITHER ADMIT THE ENDLESS 
MISERY OF HELL, OR GIVE UP THE 
ENDLESS HAPPINESS OF HEAVEN." 



91 



CHAPTER VIII. 



FAITH. 



In view of all the foregoing truth you do well 
to inquire "What must I do?" But it is now a 
question, not so much of what you must do as of 
what God has done and will do for you. There 
lies your hope. Apart from that you can only 
despairingly cry "undone, undone, God be merci- 
ful to me a sinner." But in the latter part of that 
cry there is that which reaches the heart of God. 
It will "enter into the ears of the Lord of Sab- 
aoth." 

It will not be uttered in vain. It will be well 
pleasing unto God and your extremity will be his 
opportunity. He will answer your cry by the 
visitation of his mercy upon you according to the 
riches of his grace. If you are to enter into life 
it must be by ceasing to look to self, by casting 
away the confidence of all hope in the flesh and 
fixing your look, your hope, your confidence, upon 
that great and merciful and sympathetic high 
priest who was in all points tempted as you. Your 



92 



Oo&'s Mas ©ut 



only hope is in that Sinless One who was "made 
to be sin for you," and who can and will "save 
you to the uttermost." For the excellency of the 
vision of Christ and the experience of the mercy 
of God toward you in and through Him, you will 
"count all things but loss." To "win Christ and 
be found in him, not having your own righteous- 
ness which is of the law, but that which is through 
the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of 
God by faith" — for that you must stand ready to 
"suffer the loss of all things." 

Well, if as a sinner, a convicted and helpless 
sinner, you are a docile, earnest and sincere 
seeker, you will find Christ as your Lord and 
Saviour, for he is seeking you. He came from 
heaven for the express purpose of seeking and 
saving the lost — of whom you are one. 

And the very fact that you now realize your 
condemnation as a sinner and are moved to cry, 
"God be merciful to me a sinner" is a token from 
God that the merciful and compassionate Re- 
deemer is finding you. 

For know assuredly that God does not delight 
in the death of the sinner. On the contrary his 
love for lost men is such that he "gave his only 
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him 
should not perish but have everlasting life." 



93 



<3ot>'s Map ©ut 



"For scarcely for a righteous man will one die : 
yet peradventure for a good man some would even 
dare to die." 

"But God commendeth his love toward us, in 
that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for 
us.'' 

"This is a faithful saying and worthy of all 
acceptation that Jesus Christ came into the world 
to save sinners." 

"I came not to call the righteous but sinners to 
repentance." 

In view of all these assurances, then, if you, as 
a sinner, perish, it will be clearly your own fault 
and not that of the merciful God and Saviour. 
"O Israel thou hast destroyed thyself but in me is 
thine help." 

Because of the revelations of the antecedent 
chapters as to the unspeakable importance of the 
matter, the awful nature of sin; your present 
estate of guilt, condemnation and pollution; the 
fearful looking for a future of certain, intense 
and irremediable woe — well may you sincerely, 
earnestly, solemnly ask, in the presence of such 
issues of destiny, "What must I do?" In such a 
ease you need One who is mighty to save. And, 
behold, he cometh. "Who is this that cometh 
from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? 
this that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in 

94 



Gob's Was Q\xt 



the greatness of his strength? I that speak in 
righteousness, mighty to save." Let your whole 
soul turn trustfully to him and you will realize 
the salvation of God. 

In the confusion, the terror, the amazement of 
soul, the deep distress which so suddenly seized 
the sin-convicted soul of the Philippian jailer and 
wrested from him the cry "What must I do to be 
saved?" the Apostle's all sufficient reply was "Be- 
lieve in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be 
saved." 

This is God's answer to your soul's need. And 
you must have absolute confidence in God's word 
— in what he tells you regarding the way of life. 

As a child your faith in the word of your par- 
ents was unhesitating and full. And is God any 
less worthy? 

When you find out from experience and God's 
word what you are and what you need and what 
God has done to meet that need — then in the full 
assurance of God's truth and faithfulness, let your 
soul rest therein. "According to your faith be it 
unto you.'' "Yea let God be true and every man," 
yourself included, "a liar." 

So no matter what anything in you may say, 
or what others may say or what Satan may sug- 
gest — you are to have faith in God, as against all 
creation. "Men verily swear by the greater ; and 



95 



(Bob's Mas <S>ut 



an oath for confirmation is to them an end of all 
strife." 

"Wherein God, willing more abundantly to 
show unto the heirs of promise the immutability 
of his counsel confirmed it by an oath :" "That by 
two immutable things" — that is God's word and, 
in addition to that, his oath — "in which it was 
impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong 
consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold 
upon the hope set before us." "Which hope we 
have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and 
steadfast." 

Well, you are already brought into the knowl- 
edge of your lost estate through sin. The declara- 
tions of God's word, as to the consequences there- 
of have so taken hold of you and you so believe 
them that your soul is filled with disquiet. Peace 
and rest have fled. Your need then is to also be- 
lieve the declarations of God in reference to the 
way of life and peace. So believing you shall 
find rest unto your soul and the "peace of God 
which passeth all understanding shall keep your 
heart and mind through Christ Jesus." And you 
will be thus blessed with the peace of God and 
your heart and mind kept — not from anything in 
you moving God thereto, nor yet from any mere 
whim or weakness of compassion on the part of 
God toward you. That were an uncertain, ca- 



96 



Gob's Was <§>ut 



pricious foundation on which to build your hope 
of abiding rest and peace. On the contrary it is 
in all things "well ordered and sure" because the 
integrity of the justice of God has been preserved 
in the atoning life and death of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. God can now be "just, and the justifier 
of him which believeth in Jesus." Without the 
work of Christ he could not. He could not righte- 
ously exercise his mercy toward you, and exclu- 
sion from his presence, with its consequent 
wretchedness, would justly be your portion, be- 
cause of your sins. But now the case is different. 
When you come asking for his "favor in which 
is life" — because of the sacrificially surrendered 
life of His Son for you — you are asking that 
which both his justice and his mercy are eagerly 
pleading in your behalf. You have a right to ask 
for it and a right to expect it. Coming and ask- 
ing in the name and for the sake of his dear Son 
you will not be disappointed. He delighteth in 
mercy and the way is opened up in and through 
Christ for its abundant exercise. He has cove- 
nanted to exercise it toward you and on his sure 
word you may rest your soul. "Mercy and truth 
are met together; righteousness and peace have 
kissed each other." 

And now what saith the Scripture to you? 
"Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord 

7 

97 



QoVb XKHa^ <§>ut 



shall be saved." "Ho, everyone that thirsteth, 
come ye to the waters." "Whosoever will, let him 
take the water of life freely." "God so loved the 
world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but 
have everlasting life." 

Here is the assurance of God coming to you as 
an individual — and coming to you more definitely 
than if he had spoken your name. 

The saintly Richard Baxter it was who said 
that he had a better ground of assurance for the 
extension of the divine mercy to himself person- 
ally in the use of the word "whosoever" than if 
the name Richard Baxter were used. For were it 
said that "God so loved the world that he gave 
his only begotten Son, that Richard Baxter be- 
lieving in him should not perish but have ever- 
lasting life," what assurance, said he, could he 
have that he was the person meant. It might be 
some other one of the many Richard Baxters in 
the world for whom it was intended. And thus 
his peace would have no guaranteed stability. 
But when God says "whosoever," I know I am 
one of them and that the glad tidings are for me 
without any peradventure. 

God's answer to your need as a sinner is Jesus. 
"Thou shalt call his name JESUS ; for he shall 
save his people from their sins." 



98 



GoVs Mas Qrxt 



And what is your answer to this provision of 
God? In penitent humility and yet with deep 
spiritual joy will not your heart eagerly say, 
"Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief?' Here 
you are in the presence of faith — by which you re- 
ceive Jesus and confide in him as your all-suffi- 
cient Saviour from sin, in all its aspects, and by 
which you are to be an overcomer in the Christian 
warfare. "And this is the victory which over- 
cometh the world, even your faith." This is the 
gateway of life. "By grace are you saved through 
faith." 

Now let us look at the gateway with care so 
that you may be fully assured. There are faiths 
and faiths, each with their appropriate objects and 
results. But there is only one which brings to 
you, as a needy sinner, the gift of God, which is 
eternal life, through Jesus Christ your Lord. 

Some have right objects and beneficent results 
but, nevertheless, having no reference to things 
eternal, do not therefore involve salvation from 
sin. Others have right objects without good re- 
sults. 

And still others may have wrong objects and 
detrimental results. You are now specially in- 
terested in the one which has exclusive reference 
to eternal life. 

And we sometimes are helped to a better knowl- 

99 

a. of a. 



©o& f 5 Ha^ ®\\t 



edge of a matter, to the finding out of what it is — 
by learning what it is not. 

The faith which evil men have in themselves 
and others, as they may take counsel together for 
the furtherance of unrighteousness — has it not in 
numberless instances been brought to naught of 
God ? "He made a pit and digged it and is fallen 
into the ditch which he made." 

"His mischief shall return upon his own head, 
and his violent dealing upon his own pate." 
Faith? Yes. But wrong objects and disastrous 
results, so far as the wicked are concerned. The 
Lord "makes the wrath of man to praise him," 
but little thanks to them. Many others, besides 
Absalom, have faith to engage in unholy enter- 
prises only to find themselves execrated of men 
and outcasts from God. 

And as an example of faith having a right ob- 
ject without issuing beneficently, take the case of 
devils. St. James informs us that "the devils be- 
lieve and tremble." Their faith has undoubtely 
a reference to God and Christ and his word and 
the great facts of his kingdom, while yet result- 
ing in the tormenting tremblings of fear. 

And all faiths, whatever their differences as 
to objects and results, have something in common. 

There is a conviction of the truth of things and 
this rests on testimony of one kind and another. 



Oofc's Mas ©ut 



But the faith that saves has an Object and Testi- 
mony and Result altogether exceptional. 

As to faiths with right objects and results while 
yet not opening up to you the gateway of life — 
there are many such. There, for example, is faith 
in the contents of the Scriptures. You read the 
histories, biographies, the record of varied and 
singular institutions found therein and, on the 
ample testimony by which the truth of these mat- 
ters is guaranteed, you yield your assent, you 
believe, you have faith in them, unhesitating and 
intelligent. But all this may be, you may enter 
this gateway without rinding the new life of 
which you are sorely in need. 

There also is faith in men and women in refer- 
ence to the manifold affairs of the life that now 
is. And this faith bears a stronger resemblance 
to the one which you now especially need than do 
some of the others. There is an element of trust 
in other persons about it which brings social, com- 
mercial or other rest into the soul, as the case 
may be. Were this element of personal trust ab- 
sent, domestic, social and other unrest would re- 
sult. This allies it closely in character to what 
you need, only that saving faith has to do with a 
different Person and with spiritual and eternal 
results. 

The social, commercial, educational, and polit- 



Oofc's Was ©ut 



ical life of mankind would utterly collapse were it 
not for the mutual faith whch leads us out trust- 
fully in all our relations with each other. Con- 
viction that thus and thus it will be, on the au- 
thority of such and such testimony, maintains so- 
cial order and commercial enterprise and the 
many interchanges in the complex relations of 
men, when otherwise there would be universal 
distrust, repulsion and chaotic ruin. 

But the gateway of the life that you need and 
seek is not there. 

So also may you and must you have faith in 
yourself in reference to your life's obligations and 
its possible achievements. With it you may re- 
move mountains when, without it, mole hills may 
paralyze you. 

And you have faith in the overruling provi- 
dence of God as to the triumph of righteousness 
in the earth. 

Faith is a great moving, conquering element 
in the affairs of mankind. Without it the black 
pall of a dismal, fearful, despairing and nerveless 
inertia would settle down upon the families of 
men and life would not be worth living. 

And yet all these faiths may be in healthy ex- 
ercise and beneficently fruitful, while yet, as you 
enter their gateways, you do not find that which 
satisfies the deepest needs of your heart. Your 



OoVs TKHas ©ut 



heart is crying out for the living God — for pardon 
of sin, for an assuring peace in your own soul and 
between you and God, for eternal life — but there 
you meet them not. 

"O where shall rest be found, 

Rest for the weary soul? 
'Twere vain the ocean's depths to sound, 
Or pierce to either pole." 

What you need is the vision of the Lord Jesus. 
"Sir, we would see Jesus." "Behold the Lamb of 
God." You have the vision of yourself. Behold- 
ing what manner of person you are you have been 
led, as a convicted sinner, to cry out, "What must 
I do?" Guilty, condemned, polluted, you would 
fain be delivered. 

But you look this way and that and there is no 
helper. Ah, what you need now is the seeing of 
the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
world." You must see him for yourself and your 
eyes must behold him for yourself and not for an- 
other. "Ye believe in God believe also in me." 
You do not question the truth of God or his word. 

Then you are privileged and it is your duty to 
believe the testimony of God concerning his Son 
in relation to your need as a sinner. 

You behold him in the sinless and suffering 
record of his life. And you also see him upon the 

103 



Oofc'5 Was ©ut 



cross. You are moved as you see him, on your 
account, ''enduring the contradiction of sinners 
against himself" during those marvelous years 
of his earthly ministry. 

And more especially as you follow him into 
Gethsemane, with its bloody sweat, and to Cal- 
vary with its mysterious agonies because of sin 
and the forsaking of God. In Gethsemane, why 
the agony, the falling on the ground, the strong 
crying and tears, the bloody sweat? God's word 
assures you that it was because "the Lord hath 
laid on him the iniquity of us all." That was it 
which was crushing him to the earth — the load 
of a world's sin. 

On the cross why the lamentable cry, "My God, 
my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" — revealing 
a mysterious depth of suffering beyond human 
ken? Was it not because "God made him to be 
sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be 
made the righteousness of God in him ?" "Surely 
he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." 
"He was wounded for our transgressions, he was 
bruised for our iniquities." And why was it that 
he was thus made sin, that he bore the griefs of 
men and carried their sorrows, that he was 
wounded for their transgression and bruised for 
their iniquities, that their iniquities were laid upon 
him and that he agonized with "strong crying and 



104 



(Bob's Mas <smt 



tears," that Gethsemane had to be entered and 
Calvary endured? Ah, you say, it was that sin- 
ners might go free. He was anointed by the 
Spirit to so do and endure that the broken- 
hearted might be healed, that the captives might 
be delivered, that the blind might receive their 
sight, that the burdened and bruised might be set 
at liberty. Very true. And are you not among 
that number? That is the vision of Jesus which 
you need. That is the faith which it is your duty 
and privilege to exercise. You will be sinning 
against God, against Jesus, against the Spirit, 
against your own soul, if you do not exercise it. 

You are not to believe simply that the iniquities 
of others were laid upon him, that God made him 
to be sin for them, and that by all his stripes they 
are to be healed. 

What you are to believe is that your iniquities 
were laid upon him, that he was made to be sin 
for you, and that you are to be healed by his 
stripes. You are to believe that it is your priv- 
ilege and that you will greatly honor the Lord 
Jesus and please God, in believing that the grief 
and the sorrow and the suffering that you may be 
enduring because of your sins, as you stand con- 
victed in their presence — that Jesus carried them 
all in order to free you from the burden. There 
is no reason why you should be hugging and car- 



105 



Gob's TlXIlap <S>ut 



rying them when he bore them for you. You are 
to believe that all the sins, the sorrows, the griefs, 
the iniquities, of you A. B. were laid upon him, 
that he bore them on the accursed tree and was 
made a curse that you might inherit a blessing, 
that he tasted death in order that you might taste 
the gladness and joy of life — even life forever- 
more. God asks you, A. B. to so believe. Dost 
thou so believe ? "According to your faith be it 
unto you." "Yea, let God be true and every man," 
yourself included, "a liar." In the face of every 
element of doubt that would becloud your vision 
of the Lamb slain for you, cast yourself down be- 
fore him, saying, "Lord, I believe, help thou mine 
unbelief" and your spiritual morning will dawn. 
"Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh 
in the morning." Such a vision of Christ for one- 
self and not for another or others is variously 
name'd. It is "looking to Jesus." 

"There is life for a look at the Crucified One 

There is life at this moment for thee 
Then look, sinner look unto him and be saved 
Unto him was nailed to the tree." 

On the strength of your knowledge of what he 
is and what he has done for you, your whole soul 
goes out toward him trustfully, lovingly, grate- 
fully as your God and Saviour. You commit 

106 



Gob's Mas Out 



yourself unto him as unto a faithful Creator, you 
confide, believe, have faith in him. All of these 
terms are expressive of the attitude of your soul 
toward him, as you have a vision of him as the 
One who loved and loves you, gave himself for 
you and bore your sins in his own bodv on the 
tree. 

"Not all the blood of beasts 
On Jewish altars slain, 
Could give the guilty conscience peace, 
Or wash away the stain. 

"But Christ, the heavenly Lamb, 
Takes all our sins away, 
A sacrifice of nobler name 
And richer blood than they. 

"My faith would lay her hand 
On that dear head of thine, 
While like a penitent I stand, 
And there confess my sin. 

"My soul looks back to see 

The burdens thou didst bear, 
When hanging on th' accursed tree, 
And knows her guilt was there. 

"Believing, we rejoice 
To see the curse remove ; 
We bless the Lamb with cheerful voice 
And sing his dying love." 

107 



<5ofc's Mas Out 



You see Jesus and are led by the Spirit to be- 
lieve him adequate to all your needs as a sinner. 
You flee to him as the rock of your refuge and 
trust your soul to his keeping both now and for- 
ever. You receive and rest upon him alone for 
your salvation. And this trust of your soul in 
him, this resting upon him, brings rest in your 
soul. There is the peace of God and the joy of 
salvation in it. 

The knowledge of yourself and the vision of 
Christ together with the experience of the sur- 
passing favors enjoyed in the new relation can- 
not, of course, but be attended with a degree of 
emotion, of feeling. 

As in repentance there will be sorrow for sin, 
however much or little, so in the experience of 
faith, or trust in your Saviour, there will be a 
measure of joy and gladness. Love is an emotion, 
a feeling, and it would be a contradiction in terms 
to affirm that you could be a true Christian be- 
liever, beholding Jesus as othe One "who loved 
you and gave himself for you," and at the same 
time have no feeling — that is no love. How, in 
that event could you truly sing 

"Jesus lover of my soul, 

Let me to thy bosom fly 
While the billows near me roll 
While the tempest still is high; 

108 



Gob's Mas 0\xt 



"Hide me, O my Saviour! hide, 
Till the storm of life is past; 

Save into the haven guide; 
Oh, receive my soul at last!" 

It may not be the same in degree in one as in 
another while yet this variation does not argue 
the absence of a true beholding and trust. Dif- 
ferences of natural temperament as well as dif- 
ferences in the intensity of the vision of sin and 
the Saviour as between one soul and another will 
account for variations of emotion or feeling. 

But, as in repentance the essential element is 
the turning away from sin unto God, so here it is 
not the feeling, much or little, which is essential, 
but the trustful resting on and in Eim as your 
all-sufficient refuge and redeemer. 

Antecedent to this saving faith, in which there 
is and must be this personal element — being be- 
tween you as a person and Christ as a person — 
there is exercised on your part faith in the truth 
of the word of God concerning Christ. This im- 
plies, of course, some knowledge on your part of 
the great facts of redemption — this must be pres- 
ent before faith can be intelligently exercised. But 
that knowledge need not be very extensive. It is 
not such that the learned of earth are alone capa- 
ble of acquiring and using it but it is intended of 
God for and it is adapted to the capacities of all 

109 



Gob's Hap ©ut 



who must give account. It is for all ages and 
classes and conditions of men who are capable of 
appreciating God's love in Christ and the why of 
its exercise. 

Some pass rapidly through all the stages of 
conviction, of the acquisition of needed knowl- 
edge regarding the way of life and the exercise 
of a living and loving faith in Christ, while with 
others it may be more protracted. For example, 
the Philippian jailor was suddenly convicted and 
led to exclaim "What must I do?" Briefly Paul 
instructed him in the word of God and then "he 
set meat before them and rejoiced believing in 
God with all his house." There was here a rapid 
transition from the darkness of heathenism to the 
"marvelous light" of the Gospel. 

In other instances, the time elapsing from the 
beginning of a true conviction of sin until the 
soul is made to realize the joy of a saving faith, 
may be somewhat prolonged, as in the case of 
Luther, Bunyan, and many others of God's people. 

But surely God is not chargeable with this. The 
fault is ours. "O fools and slow of heart to be- 
lieve the Scriptures." We too often stumble at 
the simplicity of the truth, like Naaman in refer- 
ence to Elisha's proposed method for curing his 
leprosy. The fault was in Naaman, not in 
Elisha. Too often is there a protracted stay in 



<3ofc's TKHa$ <§>ut 



the darkness of sin and under the bondage of the 
law, when the freedom of Christ might be glad- 
dening the heart, just because "to the Jew these 
things are a stumbling block and to the Greek 
they are foolishness." 

The sooner a soul divests itself of the sup- 
posed sufficiency or superiority of its own 
righteousness or its own knowledge and casts it- 
self down at the Cross, "putting no confidence in 
the flesh," the sooner will Christ be made unto it 
"wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and 
redemption." 

And now having come into living union with 
Christ through faith, so, through faith will you 
abide. The faith which you exercise at the begin- 
ning, and by which you consciously enter into life 
the same is it by which you grow up into him all 
through the earthly journey. 

"The faith by which a believer lives, is not spe- 
cifically different in its nature or object from the 
faith required of every man in order to his salva- 
tion. The life of faith is only the continued repe- 
tition, it may be with ever increasing strength 
and clearness, of those exercises by which we first 
received Christ, in all his fullness and in all his 
offices, as our God and Saviour." 

Being by your faith united to Christ you will, 
of course, participate in his life as the branches 



0ob 9 8 TKHas ©ut 



partake of the life of the vine. This will be one 
of its effects upon your being, in your own per- 
son, while its effects upon your external relation 
to God is that you now occupy the position of one 
who is "justified by the faith of Christ." You are 
no longer under condemnation. "There is there- 
fore now no condemnation to them which are in 
Christ Jesus." "He that believeth on him is not 
condemned." But we will leave this for the pres- 
ent, reserving its fuller consideration for the chap- 
ter on justification. 



CHAPTER IX. 



REPENTANCE. 



You have had a revelation made to you of the 
Lord Jesus Christ as your Saviour. In your help- 
less and hopeless condition, as a sinner before 
God, you have fled for refuge to Christ, believing 
in him, trusting him and rejoicing in him as your 
all-sufficient Friend and Helper. You have had a 
saving apprehension of God's mercy in Christ 
toward you. 

But along with this beholding of the Lord 
Jesus there has also been revealed to you the true 
nature of sin, and you have been conscious of a 
certain feeling in relation to it, as also of a certain 
attitude, purpose and effort. To all of these va- 
ried aspects of your soul's relation to sin the term 
repentance has been applied. It is a saving and 
gracious effect wrought in you by the Holy 
Spirit, whereby your emotions, estimates and ef- 
forts, as to sin, are changed. 

You must link it in closest association with your 
faith. Wherever the one is the other must of 
necessity already exist or inevitably follow. You 

8 

113 



(Bob's TKHay <§>ut 



cannot have the saving grace of faith without re- 
pentance, nor the saving grace of repentance with- 
out faith. God hath joined them together and no 
man can separate. To attempt to do so would 
lead either to self-righteousness or licentiousness. 

For the confirmation of your faith, the com- 
fort of your hope and the deepening of the chan- 
nels of your love to God it may be well for you 
now to critically examine yourself in relation to 
this grace. It will confirm yourself and enable 
you to confirm others by the ability to give a 
"reason for the hope that is in you." If the ap- 
propriate evidences are present it will give you 
increased boldness in the faith and the enlarged 
joy of the "full assurance" thereof. 

The time for this was not when you were 
brought to a consciousness of being in the hor- 
rible pit and sinking in the miry clay of sin. 
When in such a state it ill becomes one to spend 
time in discussion over the why and wherefore of 
things, when the hand of God in Christ is reach- 
ing down to help and the voice of Divine mercy 
is calling to the sinking one to lay hold of the hope 
set before him. The immediate duty and privilege 
is to utilize the means of present deliverance. 

But when freed from the present and pressing 
danger — then the disposition to analyze the situ- 
ation may be pursued leisurely and with profit to 

114 



Gob's Mas <S>ut 



oneself and others. Indeed to revert to it will 
form an abiding source for the quickening of rev- 
erential gratitude to God for his saving mercy. 

You were brought to realize the fact of sin's 
dominion over you and that you were under the 
condemnation of God's holy law. Conscience — 
God's vicegerent in the soul — accused you and 
said Amen to the law's condemnation. "The law 
entered that the offence might abound." Your 
state — antecedently to the beholding of Christ as 
your sin-bearer — was an unhappy one. Its dura- 
tion may be brief or quite protracted. The un- 
happiness may be intense, or not, according to the 
vivid nature of the revelation made to the soul of 
the character of sin and its deservings. "By the 
law is the knowledge of sin." To some, the sense 
of sin, the knowledge of law, the voice of con- 
science, the apprehension of justice, is such that, 
without the vision of Christ and the apprehension 
of God's mercy in him, they are driven to despair. 
They try to hide themselves from God. They 
seek death. They go to their own place. The> 
are represented as saying at last to the mountains 
and rocks, "Fall on us, and hide us from the face 
of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the 
wrath of the Lamb." This is conviction of sin. 
Without the revelation and believing appropria- 
tion of God's mercy, as shining in the face of 



115 



©o&'5 TPHas ©ut 



Jesus Christ, it is despair and death. But, with it, 
there is life, joy, peace; salvation, glory, honor, 
immortality. It is the passing away of the clouds 
and darkness and the oncoming of the "marvelous 
light" — the clear shining after rain. 

Conviction is common to the sinner who does 
not savingly behold God in the face of Jesus 
Christ and to the one who does. But from there 
is the parting of their ways. In that state they 
both may cry out, under the pressure of sin and 
law and conscience, "O wretched man that I am." 
But you look again and, lo, one still faces the way 
of death while the other has his face toward the 
City of refuge. One perhaps emerges from the 
unhappiness of this troubled estate by becoming 
indifferent, callous, hardened. The conflict of 
spirit is over and to that extent there is the happi- 
ness realized by the absence of a house divided 
against itself, even if it be but "the triumphing 
of the wicked which is short and the joy of the 
hypocrite which is but for a moment." The other 
also emerges from this inner conflict into the joy 
of an undivided heart, but it is a heart "united to 
fear the name" of Him who has become his God 
and Saviour and whom he would love with all his 
heart, soul, strength and mind. His face is to- 
ward the sun rising. 

In this troubled condition of spirit, in view of 

116 



(Sob's Was ©ut 



sin and law and conscience and the judgment to 
come, God was speaking roughly to your soul. 
But why? You remember the relationship of 
Joseph to his brethren, while governor of Egypt. 
They had been guilty of heinous conduct toward 
him. He now would fain bring them to truly 
realize this, to work repentance in them, in view 
of their offences, to discover to themselves what 
manner of men they were, to work in them a re- 
nunciation of evil and turn their hearts toward 
that which is good and right. For the determina- 
tion of this how did he at first treat them ? "And 
Joseph saw his brethren, and he knew them, but 
made himself strange with them, and spake 
roughly unto them." Or, as it is also rendered, 
"Hard things with them." But did he delight 
in this ? Most assuredly not. While doing so and 
thus giving his brethren the impression that he 
was unfriendly to them, all the while his heart 
was yearning over them in loving solicitude for 
their welfare. So much so that he had to leave 
the room and allow his surcharged Heart to over- 
flow in tears of affectionate devotion. Judgment 
was his strange work and aspect toward them but 
he delighted in mercy. He was longing for the 
time to fully come when he could make a revela- 
tion of himself to them and embrace them in the 
arms of his loyal and loving care. 

117 



Gob's Ma^ <§>ut 



This time came, but not before they were led — 
by the voice of conscience and the knowledge of 
sin through the workings of God's law — to cry 
out "We are verily guilty concerning our brother ; 
in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he 
besought us, and we would not hear ; therefore is 
this distress come upon us." They are troubled 
because of their sins. This is well. But the joys 
of fellowship are better than separations and re- 
straints, even though they be those of penitent 
souls. So he makes himself known and there are 
such glad communings that "the fame thereof is 
heard in Pharaoh's house." 

So God did not willingly afflict nor grieve you 
but the rather that you might be the better pre- 
pared to profit by the revelation of his love and 
mercy in Christ. "The law was your schoolmas- 
ter to bring you to Christ." Let your heart then 
be filled with thanksgiving that he brought you, 
for he sometimes visits souls in great severity 
without their being brought nigh, but the rather 
driven into greater hardness and impenitency of 
heart. 

Conviction of sin comes to two souls but to the 
one it is a savor of life while to the other it is a 
savor of death. To the one it comes like the melt- 
ing power of the sun upon the wax, but to the 



118 



Gob's Was Out 



other it is the hardening influence of the sun upon 
the clay. 

Both are in sorrow and troubled because of sin. 
Repentance is present in each, but one is unto life, 
the other unto death. 

The true, views sin not only in its relation to 
the sinner as to the present and prospective con- 
sequences thereof, but also as to its own unholy 
and repugnant nature and of its antagonism to 
the nature of a holy God. The false, views sin 
chiefly in relation to the consequences to be en- 
dured because of it. The true cries out, "O 
wretched man that I am who shall deliver me 
from my sins — from this body of death?" The 
false cries, "How shall I escape" — not from my 
sins, but simply "from the results of my sins?" 
The criminal who is detected, arrested, convicted, 
may grieve because of such results of his offences. 
But only let them be removed and the pathways 
of sin are again trodden from choice. If he be 
kept therefrom to any extent the restraint is from 
without, not from within. But to the one who 
turns. from evil, because it is evil, and hateful to 
his own soul and to God, and not simply in view 
of the present risk of detrimental effects, to such 
an one the restraint is from within instead of 
without. He is a law unto himself. "The law 
was not made for a righteous man." David sins 

119 



©o&'s Mas ©ut 



— it is brought home to him. He prostrates him- 
self before God in penitent abasement, crying out, 
"I have sinned against the Lord." Such a vision 
of sin is his that he abhors it, and himself be- 
cause of it, and cries out for the cleansing min- 
istry of the Spirit. Sin is the great evil from 
which he would be delivered and fitness for the 
fellowship of the Holy One the boon which his 
soul craved. 

"Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity and 
cleanse me from my sin." 

"Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward 
parts : and in the hidden part shalt thou make me 
to know wisdom." 

"Purge me with hysop, and I shall be clean; 
wash me and I shall be whiter than snow." 

"Create in me a clean heart, O God; and re- 
new a right spirit within me." 

And when to the patriarch Job was revealed the 
vision of God, he exclaimed, "Now mine eye 
seeth thee — wherefore I abhor myself, and repent 
in dust and ashes." 

And Isaiah, after the vision of the Lord, ex- 
claimed, "Woe is me ! for I am undone ; because 
I am a man of unclean lips, and dwell in the midst 
of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have 
seen the King, the Lord of hosts." 

To such souls it is the presence of sin that 



Gob's Way <§>ut 



troubles them and from which they would fain be 
delivered. And so the response comes to Isaiah, 
as the cleansing efficacy of the fire of God is ap- 
plied to him, "Lo, this hath touched thy lips ; and 
thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin is 
purged.'' 

But Judas, and others like him, sin, and there 
is an horror of great darkness and despair, as 
conscience and the law of God grasps them 
mightily. From their awful workings they hasten 
"to their own place," if peradventure they may 
hide themselves from "him who sitteth upon the 
throne and from the wrath of the Lamb," and 
blot out in the silence of the grave the vision and 
voice of their fearful inner accusers. Vain hope. 
It shall perish. 

In varying measures of intensity then, the true 
repentance, which is unto life, will turn away 
from sin unto God, while the false, which is unto 
death, has no quarrel with sin, as such, except in 
so far as its results are troublesome. 

To you, amid your troubled thoughts and emo- 
tions because of your sins and your sense of con- 
demnation on their account, there was revealed 
the Lamb of God taking away sins, "bearing them 
in his own body on the tree." Not only did you 
see and believe him to be a sin-bearer in general 
and for others, but you were led by the Spirit to 



©o&'s IKHa^ ©ut 



behold him as bearing your sins and "blotting out 
the handwriting of ordinances that was against 
you, which was contrary to you, and took it out 
of the way, nailing it to his cross." In this faith 
you exclaimed, "My Lord and my God." You 
were led to rejoice in his salvation and gladdened 
by the blessed rest and peace coming into your 
soul after the antecedent fears. You knew and 
felt that "his banner over you was love." And 
what effect did all this have upon your vision and 
feeling and purpose and endeavor in regard to 
sin? Did not Gethsemane and Calvary, — in their 
awful revelations of what your Saviour endured 
for you — did they not reveal sin as a thing hate- 
ful and to be hated ? And in the light of the cross 
and your new found liberty from the fear and the 
bondage which had oppressed you, was there not 
aroused in your soul a feeling of personal an- 
tagonism to sin, as that which your now regener- 
ated nature instinctively felt to be, always and 
everywhere, your implacable enemy? Because of 
sin you endured much and your Lord endured 
more. Because of what you saw in him and out 
of a grateful recognition of what he did for you, 
your soul went out toward him in love. And, 
in view of all, you became, like him, a "lover of 
righteousness" and a "hater of iniquity" and he 
"anointed you with the oil of gladness." Through 



Gob's Was ©ut 



the law and its revelations to you of yourself and 
your deservings and through the agonizing Christ, 
who was "made to be sin for you," you came to 
see sin as "exceeding sinful" and your heart in 
reference to it was moved to sorrow and hate 
and repudiation. You turned away from it to 
God. And that was the essential part of your re- 
pentance. To you, on the one hand, there was 
granted a vision of sin, of law, of condemnation 
and the experience of an accusing conscience. On 
the other there was the vision of the crucified 
One and the experience of God's saving mercy 
in and through Him. But, to any one capable of 
emotion, all this could not be without there being 
present, in some measure, — in proportion to the 
experience and the revelation — the feeling of 
grief and sorrow and hatred because of sin as well 
as of love because of a Saviour and his salvation. 

But while the feeling, the emotion, is well pleas- 
ing as an index of the soul's attitude, yet it is the 
turning away from sin unto God which is abid- 
ingly profitable and pleasing. Given any amount 
of emotion without the turning away and what 
doth it profit ? But given the turning away from 
sin unto God, whether there be much emotion or 
little, — and the goal is heaven. 

The sorrow for sin, attendant upon true re- 
pentance, is not that which God would have for- 



123 



OoVs WLay ©ut 



ever present as a thing to be desired. It is to be 
transient as sin — God would have us neither to 
sorrow nor to be sinful, but to be holy and full of 
rejoicing. God does not delight in sorrow for its 
own sake and he will not permit its presence in 
heaven. If he does so here and is pleased to be- 
hold it, as the token of the new life of his repent- 
ant children, yet he will be more pleased to have 
them enjoy the fellowship and the fullness of the 
abounding holiness, where sin shall never be wit- 
nessed. 

And so Paul, giving expression to the divine 
mind in II Cor. vii:9, says, "Now I rejoice, not 
that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to 
repentance : for ye were made sorry after a Godly 
manner." It was not the sorrow that they were to 
rest in, neither was that it which was delighting 
the soul of the Apostle or finally pleasing to God, 
but rather the turning from sin unto holiness, of 
which the sorrow was but an accompaniment and 
an index. What pleased God and what "ap- 
proved them to be clear in this matter" was the 
"carefulness," the "clearing," the "indignation," 
the "fear," the "vehement desire," the "zeal," the 
"revenge," as to sin and all its manifestations. 

And not only were you characterized by this 
turning from sin unto God, when, at the begin- 
ning, Christ was revealed to you as your sin 



124 



Gob's Was <§>ut 



bearer and you trustfully accepted him as such. 
When you first consciously became a Christian, 
the turning from sin, then present, with all its 
attendant emotion, however much or little, — that, 
properly enough, is regarded as the great act of 
repentance which eclipses all others. 

But you are not to regard it as the only one. 
That accompanied the great initial act of obedi- 
ence when a rebel was changed into a loyal sub- 
ject of the King of glory. But wherever and 
whenever sin is present there will be occasion for 
the exercise of repentance. And that will be dur- 
ing the continuance of your whole mortal life. 
If you need daily to pray, as you certainly do, 
"forgive my debts as I forgive my debtors," there 
is implied the daily presence and activity of sin, 
and thereby the daily need of turning away there- 
from unto God "with full purpose of and endeavor 
after new obedience." And this will continue, 
until you are privileged to sing, as an expression 
of actual realization, "Unto him that loved me and 
washed me from my sins in his own blood. 

And hath made me a King and a priest unto 
God and his Father: to him ever be glory and 
dominion for ever and ever. Amen." 

While you are now "complete in him," so far 
as your standing before God is concerned, and 
"Christ has become to you the end of the law for 

125 



GoVs TPOtas Out 



righteousness;" while to you, being "in Christ 
Jesus," "there is therefore now no condemnation" 
and naught can "separate you from the love 
of God which is in Christ Jesus your Lord," yet 
the actual, full and final elimination of sin from 
your nature, -has not been accomplished. While 
this remains, "repentance toward God and faith 
toward your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ," will 
be a daily need of your spiritual life and warfare. 
And indeed, with your increasing vision of the 
beauty of holiness, your growing knowledge of 
God and yourself, your deepening love for him 
who is becoming more and more to you the "chief 
among ten thousand and the one altogether 
lovely," there will be correspondingly present a 
repentant turning away from sin as an unholy, 
hateful and corrupt thing, displeasing to you and 
to God. 

You will also realize more and more deeply, 
that all sin, in the last analysis, is against God. 
While it is true that you may sin against your own 
soul and offend against the generation of the 
righteous it yet remains that all sin at last strikes 
at God. This the Scriptures plainly affirm. 
Joseph, when tempted to a sin, the evil results of 
which would be against himself and others, ex- 
claimed, "How can I do this great wickedness and 
sin against God ?" 

126 



Gob's Was Out 



And David, after so heinously sinning against 
others and himself, when led by the Spirit to true 
repentance, was also taught to say, "Against thee, 
thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in thy 
sight." 

The same fact may be righteously inferred from 
the teaching of the Apostle as to the glorifying 
of God by all the manifested life of a renewed 
soul. "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or 
whatsover ye do, do all to the glory of God." 
Your life, then, in all its details, while in the first 
place it may be truly for yourself, yet, in the final 
summing up, is affirmed to be for God. 

Is it not therefore, truly implied, on the other 
hand, that all in your life, which, in the first place, 
is to be regarded as against yourself or others, 
is yet, in the final estimate, to be adjudged as 
against God? So that by direct affirmation as 
well as by parity of reasoning, the Scriptures 
teach that all sin is to be regarded as committed 
against God. This recognition will increase your 
sense of the solemnity as well as dignity of your 
life, seeing that all its multitudinous expressions 
are either for or against God. It will give added 
earnestness, intensity, fervor, reverence to your 
daily repentances, as well as crown your daily 
righteousness with the brightness of the glory 
land. And that, too, however apparently trivial 



127 



©o&'a Ma^ ©ut 



they may be, as they ripple playfully, innocently, 
joyously on the surface of your daily, honest life, 
or go deeper into its currents in the more serious 
experiences. 

"A servant with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine; 
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, 
Makes that and th' action fine." 

It is not necessary, surely, to remind you that 
repentance is not to be confounded with penance. 

Everything in the way of suffering for sin by 
way of atonement therefor so that it might be 
blotted out and your soul enter into the gladness 
of conscious deliverance — that was endured 
for you by your Saviour when he voluntarily 
"bore your sins in his own body." He suffered 
for your sin so that you might not. Then why 
do penance ? He did that. And so far as the sins 
are concerned which you daily commit as a child 
of God, after you have experienced his gracious 
mercy, he himself will see to the meting out to 
you of all needed chastisement for your good. 
"Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth and 
scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." 

It is not at all necessary, then, for you to take 
yourself in hand and determine the suffering you 
are to endure, by way of penance, for this, that, 

128 



Gob's TPflas ©ut 



or the other sin. It is for you to turn from the 
sin, with whatever emotions of hate and love, as 
to sin and holiness, may be wrought in you by the 
word and Spirit. 

And as to the punishment therefor, which may, 
or ought to follow, your Father will see to that 
much more unerringly, as to kind and degree, 
than you possibly can. 

"Could my tears forever flow, 
Could my zeal no respite know; 
All for sin could not atone, 
Thou must save and thou alone." 

He will be the Alpha and the Omega of your 
salvation, both as to all suffering for the original 
cancellation of your guilt, as well as to all chastise- 
ment administered in love, on account of any way- 
wardness of yours as his child by the adoption of 
grace. 

In reference to all suffering for sin, whether as 
to that committed before or after your "acceptance 
in the beloved," it is for your good and his glory 
to leave all that with the Lord rather than take it 
in your own hands. Repudiating your own as 
well as others decisions in relation to what you 
might be adjudged to endure by way of penance 
for sin, it is your privilege and duty to exclaim 
with David: "Let me now fall into the hand of 

9 

129 



Oofc'0 Map <S>ut 



the Lord: for very great are his mercies: but let 
me not fall into the hand of man." 

As to crime and its punishment, that is another 
and different question. Thus, in the presence, on 
the one hand, of your sins, and, on the other, of 
the greatness of the undeserved love of your 
Lord in pardoning your transgression, in receiv- 
ing you graciously and in loving you freely, you 
will be moved, penitently, reverently, lovingly, 
humbly to say with Mephibosheth, in the presence 
of David, "What is thy servant, that thou shouldst 
look upon such a dead dog as I am ?" 

To God be the glory and praise, even of your 
repentance. It is his own blessed gift to you. 
"Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted re- 
pentance unto life." 



130 



CHAPTER X. 



M3PHIB0SHETH. 



There is a brief Scripture biography which may 
be introduced here. It will help as an illustration 
of the truth from life and be of service to you in 
seeing and accepting the way. It is the story of 
Mephibosheth as given us in the following por- 
tions of Scripture, viz. : 2 Sam. ix ; 1 Sam. xx : 
11-17; 2 Sam. iv:4; 2 Sam. xvi:i-4; 2 Sam. 
xix 124-30. 

This narrative, though brief, is yet marvelously 
full of the fundamental elements of the gospel of 
the kingdom. Your condition as a sinner, with 
the gracious provision made for your relief, and 
its effect upon your soul, as you believingly ap- 
prehend and realize it, — all this the Holy Spirit 
has therein wonderfully illustrated. You may re- 
gard the biography as setting forth the return of 
a sinner to God together with the treatment ac- 
corded him upon his return. 

The first fact to be noted, as stated in 2 Sam. 
iv:4, and 2 Sam. ix:i3, is that he was lame on 
both his feet as the result of a fall. The crippling 

131 



©o&'0 Was 0\xt 



was total, not partial. You may take this as illus- 
trative of the fact taught throughout the Scrip- 
tures, viz. : that the presence and effects of sin 
, have extended to our whole being. In the use of 
the phrase "total depravity," it is not intended to 
affirm that all are just as bad as they can be. This 
certainly is not true, not being borne out either by 
the facts of experience or the teaching of the 
Scripture. But nevertheless the phrase is true in 
the sense that the evil effects of sin are realized 
throughout the totality of our nature — no part 
being exempt. Our bodies are certainly affected. 
And whatever way you may view the immaterial 
side of our being, whether in the commonly ac- 
cepted three-fold division of the will together with 
the intellectual and emotional, or whatever other 
method you may adopt, it still remains true that 
sin has so lodged itself in the soul that all of its 
varying manifestations and activities feel its 
blighting presence. No department of your being 
has escaped it. It is total. And the salvation 
wrought for you must and will be as universal 
as this your need. Through sin therefore, your 
crippling is not partial but total, — on both your 
feet. 

Mephibosheth dwelt in a place called Lo-debar 
the meaning of which is "without pasture." 
And in such a place are we by nature dwelling. 

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Gob's TKHas ©ut 



Spiritual Lo-debars, sterile, forbidding, destitute 
of the nutritive elements which should be our por- 
tion as those who are of the seed royal. 

But from the city of the great king word is 
sent down to Mephibosheth to leave Lo-debar. 
David takes the initiative in sending for him. 
Mephibosheth would never have done this of his 
own motion. In his poverty-stricken and alien- 
ated, Lo-debar condition, he would have remained, 
so far as he was concerned. And so will every 
sinner. If a soul ever moves away from it it will 
be because God graciously takes the initiative and 
sends for it. If "we love him," is it not "because 
he first loved us?'' In pursuance of this love he 
sends his messengers of grace to lead you into the 
fullness of blessing which he delights to minister. 

Well, with mingled emotions, Mephibosheth, 
having received the command and invitation, be- 
gins the journey. He is not yet fully assured as 
to what the outcome may be. But, moved by the 
spirit of obedience, he will go with fear and 
trembling, casting himself upon the mercy of the 
great king. From the salutation of the king when 
he came into his presence, we conclude that he 
was fearful as to the kind of reception awaiting 
him. And such fear he no doubt regarded as 
well-grounded in view of his position and ante- 
cedents as being of the house of Saul, the tra- 

i33 



(Soft's Map Orxt 



ditional enemy of David. The consciousness of 
all this troubled him. 

And so has it more or less every soul who has 
heard the voice of God by his messengers calling 
them from their spiritual Lo-debars. There is a 
time, brief, or more continued, during which, in 
view of their aroused sense of sinful alienation 
and ill desert or conviction of sin they are sub- 
ject to fear as to the outcome of God's dealing 
with them. But moved by the spirit of obedience, 
wrought in them by the Spirit, such souls never- 
theless go in fear and trembling, casting them- 
selves upon the divine mercy. And when they 
come — what then? 

Well, what was the greeting which Mephibo- 
sheth received from the king when he presented 
himself? He first spoke his name, kindly you 
may well believe, the very tone of his voice re- 
assuring the troubled heart. "He calleth his own 
sheep by name." And when, in a self-deprecating 
and trembling yet loyal way, Mephibosheth 
answered, "Behold thy servant!" the king's re- 
sponse came quickly, "Fear not." You may well 
believe that there now entered into Mephibo- 
sheth's soul the glad consciousness of an old fear 
being supplanted by a present joy, for was he not 
accepted of the king, was not the light of the 
king's countenance lifted upon him? 



134 



Oofc's Mas ©ut 



And this has and will be the uniform experience 
of every one coming to God in obedience to his 
gracious call. As you present yourself humbly 
before him he speaks kindly to your heart. The 
pulsing tide of a new life is consciously realized 
as you joyfully hear from his own lips the com- 
forting assurance, "Son be of good cheer, thy 
sins are forgiven thee." You look into his face and 
the light thereof is lifted upon you. 

But for the why and wherefore of the con- 
soling word of the king, his gracious look 
and beneficent conduct toward Mephibosheth, 
you must look elsewhere. It was not on 
Mephibosheth's own account simply that the 
king was so graciously disposed. There was 
another reason, back of all his sorry plight, 
which moved and obligated David to so look and 
speak and act. "Fear not, for I will surely show 
thee kindness," but why? For thine own sake, 
Mephibosheth ? Not so. "I will surely shew thee 
kindness for Jonathan's sake." A much better 
ground of confidence this than if it were done for 
his own sake. You remember the covenant 
mutually entered into by David and Jonathan, in 
which they pledged each other, because of their 
love, to do certain things. So long as each re- 
mained faithful to each in the fulfillment of these 
covenant obligations, so long was their solemn 

135 



Oofc's Hay ©ut 



binding force recognized as present, compelling 
with the compulsion of love to the practical shew- 
ing forth of the kindness upon which they had 
mutually agreed. 

Well, Jonathan proved faithful to the end and 
passed into the heavens. So that now all possi- 
bility of the violation, on his part, of the covenant 
mutually entered into, is forever removed. Had 
Jonathan violated it David would have been re- 
leased. But, in the absence of such violation, the 
promise, lovingly given, holds. And David gladly 
recognizes its ever abiding force. "Fear not: for 
I will surely shew thee kindness for Jonathan's 
sake." And if for Jonathan's sake, then the time 
can now never come when this obligation shall 
cease. David cannot free himself therefrom and 
Mephibosheth can plead for and claim kindness 
at the hands of David with confidence, based on 
the righteousness of his claim, in view of David's 
covenant with Jonathan. This would be absent 
were he coming simply in his own name. 

There is herein illustrated for you the blessed 
ground of the assurance of eternal life which it 
is your privilege to entertain. 

When God says to you, "Fear not," gladdens 
you with the light of his face and deals kindly 
with you, were there no other ground of confi- 
dence for you as to the continuance of all this 



136 



Gob's Was <§>ut 



other than your own immediate personality and its 
needs — your hope were indeed a broken reed. 
But it is not so. "Not for your sakes, do I this, 
saith the Lord God, be it known unto you; be 
ashamed and confounded for your own ways, O 
house of Israel." Then for whose sake is it? 
Need I answer ? As in the one case for Jonathan's 
sake, so now the kindness of God is and will be 
shewn unto you for Jesus' sake. 

"My hope is built on nothing less 

Than Jesus' blood and righteousness; 
I dare not trust the sweetest frame, 

But wholly lean on Jesus' name, 
On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; 
All other ground is sinking sand." 

Such a hope is "sure and steadfast" for the 
same reason that Mephibosheth's was, viz.: the 
covenant obligations of the great king. The 
Father and the Son entered in a mutual covenant 
in the eternal past, according to the Scripture, and 
in pursuance of its obligations and in order to 
fulfill the same the Son says, "Sacrifice and offer- 
ing thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou pre- 
pared me: In burnt offerings and sacrifices 
for sin thou hast had no pleasure. Then said I, 
lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written 
of me) to do thy will, O God." 

137 



(Bofc's Wag ©ut 



The Son so fulfilled what he voluntarily as- 
sumed that he could exclaim on the cross, "It is 
finished." Not one jot or tittle of all that he had 
covenanted to do failed. What then? Just this 
— that if he failed not in fulfilling neither will the 
Father fail in being under obligation to fulfill. 
The promise of love to you, to shew kindness to 
you, was made to and in Christ from "before the 
foundation of the world," and "all the promises of 
God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the 
glory of God by us." You come then, with a 
confidence born of the fact that God — be it spoken 
with reverence — cannot free himself from the ob- 
ligation to shew kindness to you. It is an obliga- 
tion voluntarily entered into and continuing for 
ever because of the finished work of the Son. 

In Christ and for his sake you claim this kind- 
ness as that to which you are righteously entitled. 
God honors this plea and is honored by it. "This 
is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased," 
and with you, for that dear Son's sake, will he 
also be well pleased. He will speak words of 
cheer, your heart will be made glad before him, 
and he will unfold to you the plentiful provisions 
of his grace, the rich inheritance in store and the 
assurance of his abiding presence. 

All this is expressly declared. "I will restore 
thee all the land of Saul, thy father." That, in 



138 



GoD's Was ©ut 



addition, or as a part of the wider range of bless- 
ing involved in the varied elements of the King's 
fellowship and favor. 

Richer was Mephibosheth now than if had con- 
tinued in the undisturbed possession of his 
father's patrimony. From the poor condition of 
one whose inheritance had been alienated he rises 
to that of one unto whom not only the old but 
vastly more than the old has been restored. 

And for you, in Christ, is there likewise to be 
this enlargement, beyond what you can "ask or 
think," as compared to the patrimony lost by you 
through sin. "I am come that they might have 
life and that they might have it more abundantly." 
Into the king's presence he comes and there 
abides. He goes no more out forever. 

"Thou shalt eat bread at my table continually." 

"For the mountains shall depart and the hills 
be removed; but my kindness shall not depart 
from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace 
be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on 
thee." 

"For I am persuaded, that neither death nor 
life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor 
things present, nor things to come, 

"Nor height, nor depth, nor any other crea- 
ture, shall be able to separate us from the love of 
God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 



i39 



Gofe's Was Out 



And what spirit does Mephibosheth shew as the 
recipient of such favor? He is evidently filled 
with a profound sense of humility on the one 
hand and with a corresponding gratitude on the 
other. Humility because of a vivid apprehension 
of his own unworthiness and gratitude because of 
the greatness of the favor. The proportions of 
the latter tower majestically before his vision, not 
only absolutely, but all the more because of their 
relation to and comparison with his sense of his 
own demerit. And so, looking upon himself and 
then upon the king's treatment of him, there is 
such an onrush of genuine humility and grateful 
recognition that he exclaims : "What is thy serv- 
ant, that thou shouldst look upon such a dead 
dog as I am?" 

Thus has it and will it ever be. Not only will 
you be characterized by humility before God, in 
view of your sins, and a grateful acknowledgment 
of his mercies be forthcoming, but each of these 
will be enlarged by their mutual influence upon 
one another and in proportion to the keenness of 
your apprehension of the truth of things. God 
may take various ways to open your eyes to see 
yourself as you are and have been and to behold 
him and his benefits. And this revelation may 
vary in degree — more to one than to another. The 
fountains of your emotions may be stirred more 

140 



Gob's Was ©ut 



or less profoundly because of the vision. Deep 
humility because of sin will be balanced by a cor- 
respondingly exalted gratitude because of gra- 
cious favor. Thus, in proportion to the individual 
apprehension of the truth, will there come to each 
truly penitent soul — standing in the presence of 
and listening to the declarations of the divine 
love — such a stirring of the emotional fountains 
as will mean, whether uttered or unexpressed, the 
prostration of self in humility before the great 
King and the grateful exaltation and crowning of 
him Lord of all. 



141 



CHAPTER XL 



RIGHTEOUSNESS. 



To still further reveal and illustrate the way of 
life and confirm you in the faith thereof, let us 
briefly study one of the great foundation words of 
the Bible, viz.: Righteousness. In the examina- 
tion of this term you will find that its relations 
and meanings vary. Let our present purpose be 
to find the righteousness which shall be our sal- 
vation. 

You meet it, for example, in Ps. 97 :2, "Clouds 
and darkness are round about him : righteousness 
and judgment are the habitation of his throne." 
Here it refers to God's absolute and essential 
righteousness, without which his Deity would 
cease. 

Again Is. 45:19, "I have not spoken in secret, 
in a dark place of the earth : I said not unto the 
seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain: I the Lord 
speak righteousness, I declare things that are 
right." This is God's relative righteousness — a 
declaration of the expression in word which he 
makes of his essential nature. 

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<3o&'s TP&las Q\xt 



Then too, Jer. 9:24, "Let him that glorieth 
glory in this that he understandeth and knoweth 
me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving- 
kindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the 
earth: for in these things I delight saith the 
Lord." 

Here also is a declaration of God's relative 
righteousness — the expression of his essential 
nature in action. 

Now, with the foregoing we have nothing to 
do, so far as our present quest is concerned. This 
belongs to God, as God, but you are seeking one 
which you can call your own and be for salvation. 

In the pursuit of it we find one which comes 
exclusively within the domain of human char- 
acter and conduct and at the same time receives 
the high commendation of God. And that, too, no 
matter where found. It is commendable when- 
ever and between whomsoever it may be mani- 
fested, the world over, irrespective of their mani- 
fold religious distinctions. For example: Jer. 
22:3, "Thus saith the Lord: execute ye judg- 
ment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled 
out of the hand of the oppressor: and do no 
wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the father- 
less, nor the widow, neither shed innocent blood 
in this place." Then too, Dan. 4 \2j, "Wherefore, 
O king, let my counsel be acceptable unto thee, 



143 



Oob'B TPdla^ <§>ut 



and break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine 
iniquities by shewing mercy to the poor; if it 
may be a lengthening of thy tranquillity." 

So also, Lev. 19:15, which might serve as a 
motto in all our courts, "Ye shall do no un- 
righteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect 
the person of the poor, nor honour the person of 
the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge 
thy neighbor." 

Here then, is a righteousness, more or less 
possessed and exhibited by all, too much of which 
we cannot have, and which receives the high com- 
mendation of God. 

But now a strange thing occurs. You take it 
and begin to bank on it or build on it — as there is 
an inveterate tendency in all men to do — in the 
belief and hope that through its agency you will 
enter into life, and you will immediately have to 
face the condemnation instead of the commenda- 
tion of God. What he before approved he now 
repudiates. For example, Matt. 5 :20, "For I say 
unto you, that except your righteousness shall ex- 
ceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Phari- 
sees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of 
heaven." Titus 3 :5, "Not by works of righteous- 
ness which we have done, but according to his 
mercy he saved us, by the washing of regenera- 
tion and renewing of the Holy Ghost." Is. 64 :6, 

144 



OoVs TPdtas <S>ut 



"But we are all as an unclean thing and all our 
righteousness areas filthy rags." Very differ- 
ent here is the language of God concerning "our'' 
righteousness from what it was in the antecedent 
series of quotations. And why? Just because it 
is now out of place. A new use is attempted to 
be made of it, which involves on the part of man 
a monopoly of the glory of salvation. God says, 
"My glory will I not give to another," and yet 
that is just what man proposes to arrogate in at- 
tempting to transfer his righteousness to a new 
sphere and to a new use. He would remove the 
crown from the head of him to whom salvation 
belongs and place it upon his own. 

What a beneficent thing is earth in the gardens 
and fields. You speak its praises as it nurtures 
the golden grain and causes the landscape to be 
adorned with the beauty and fragrance of the 
flowers. But let that same earth be brought into 
your parlor and you cannot abide it. It now be- 
comes "dirt" and the worthy mistress of the house 
has it swept into regions beyond. It is out 
of place. And so there is such a thing as moral 
dirt, which God repudiates and sweeps from his 
presence. 

But is there not a righteousness which you may 
call your own, which will not be thus repudiated 
and which, at the same time, will become your 
10 

i4S 



<&o&'8 TPHas Q\xt 



salvation? Let us pursue the inquiry — In Ps. 
132 :g it is said, "Let thy priests be clothed with 
righteousness; and let thy saints shout for joy." 
And in verse 16, "I will also clothe her priests 
with salvation: and her saints shall shout aloud 
for joy." Here then, in one verse, the clothing of 
the priesthood is called righteousness and in the 
other it is called salvation. There seems to be a 
righteousness then which is identical with sal- 
vation. But look again, Is. 61 no, "I will greatly 
rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my 
God ; for he hath clothed me with the garments of 
salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of 
righteousness." Here, in two clauses of the same 
verse, the fact is announced that there is a 
righteousness which is identical with salvation, 
and that the realization of this on the part of the 
soul is a source of great gladness. 

This being so, the query still remains — what is 
it ? And — where are we to find it ? We have seen 
that the two former righteousnesses, viz. : that of 
God and man, which we first examined, were not 
of the nature to answer our purpose or meet our 
need. This, therefore, must be one with marks 
distinguishing it from the others as to origin, 
relation and effect. 

In order to determine the matter your attention 
will have to be given to a phrase which repeat- 



146 



Gob's Was ©ut 



edly meets you in the Epistle to the Romans. For 
example, in Rom. I :i7, "For therein is the 
righteousness of God revealed." The phrase 
which you must specially note is "righteousness 
of God." Again, in Rom. 3:21, "But now the 
righteousness of God without the law is mani- 
fested, being witnessed by the law and the proph- 
ets." So also, Rom. 10 13, "For they being ignor- 
ant of God's righteousness, and going about to 
establish their own righteousness, have not sub- 
mitted themselves unto the righteousness of God." 
Now, the query is — what does the phrase 
"righteousness of God'' mean? Does it refer to 
that righteousness of God with which this inquiry 
began, — that which was his essentially and to 
which expression was given in word and deed? 
This cannot be for the very good reason that in 
these phrases in Romans we have a righteous- 
ness which is evidently transferable, while the 
righteousness with which the inquiry opened was 
just as evidently not transferable. That this is 
transferable is clearly revealed by the Apostle in 
Rom. 3 :22, when he says, "Even the righteousness 
of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all 
and upon all them that believe." Here then is a 
righteousness of God which can be transferred — 
can pass over from him to men. And, having 
passed over, it becomes their salvation. But this 

i47 



©o6'a XWla^ ©ut 



cannot be said of that righteousness which is es- 
sentially his. That is not to be transferred to the 
creature. Otherwise the Creator would cease to 
be what he is. So also would the creature. They 
would change places. 

Now what righteousness is it that can thus be 
transferred, and where is it to be found? To 
answer this, you have but to look again at Rom. 
i :iy. You may include verse 16 also. "For I am 
not ashamed of the gospel of Christ : for it is the 
power of God unto salvation to every one that 
believeth ; to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 
For therein is the righteousness of God revealed 
from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall 
live by faith." 

The word "therein," in verse 17, reveals where 
this transferable "righteousness of God" is to be 
found. Find that out and you have arrived at the 
goal of your quest. Well, what is the antecedent 
of "therein ?" Is it not the "gospel of Christ," in 
the preceding verse? For "therein," that is, in 
the "gospel of Christ," is the "righteousness of 
God" revealed. Now, what righteousness is it 
that is revealed in the gospel of Christ, which 
makes it the "power of God unto salvation?" 
What but the righteousness of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, the God-man, the Divine-human Saviour 
of men ? The relationship he bore to violated law 



Gob's Mas <S>ut 



— to offended justice — as he was "made under it," 
was such that it was vindicated, satisfied, per- 
fectly fulfilled, that all its claims were so fully met 
by and in him, as our atoning Sacrifice and Medi- 
ator, that by him it could be said upon the cross, 
"it is finished." The work given him of the 
Father in our behalf he, by his life and death, ac- 
complished, thereby achieving a righteousness 
called the "righteousness of God," which by him 
may be imputed to us, transferred, laid to our ac- 
count, and by us received through faith, so that 
we become the "righteousness of God" in him. 
"For he hath made him to be sin for us, who 
knew no sin; that we might be made the 
righteousness of God in him." 

Here then, you have found the "garment of 
salvation," the "robe of righteousness," the recep- 
tion of which makes the soul "joyful in God." 
You are "complete in him.'' "This is his name 
whereby he shall be called, The: Lord Our 
Righteousness. 

Before dismissing it let us look at it from one 
or two other view points. Daniel says regarding 
it in Chap. 9:24, "Seventy weeks are determined 
upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish 
the transgression and to make an end of sins, and 
to make reconciliation for iniquity and to bring 
in everlasting righteousness." Is it not well for 



149 



(Soft's Mas ©ut 



even the best of God's saints upon the earth — 
whose righteousness, steady-going though it be 
in the main, is yet, to their own knowledge if not 
that of others, fitful, — is it not well to have a 
righteousness that is not fitful, yea even that is 
"everlasting" ? 

How much does such a priceless boon cost? 
Cost for you? You know somewhat as to its 
cost for him. Gethsemane and Calvary tell you. 
But what do we have to pay for it? Rom. 5:17 
answers: "For if by one man's offense death 
reigned by one; much more they which receive 
abundance of grace and of the gift of righteous- 
ness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ." It 
is then a "gift," "without money and without 
price." 

And how received? "Even the righteousness 
of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all 
and upon all them that believe: for there is no 
difference." You just reach forth and take it by 
your faith. In one sense, therefore, your faith 
saves you, but not really. You are in danger of 
death by starvation. Bread is offered you. You 
reach forth your hand to receive. What is it that 
saves you — your hand or the bread? You are 
dying of thirst. Water is brought. You eagerly 
grasp it. Which is it that saves you — the hand 
or the water ? Your hand is an instrumental cause 

150 



Govs Mas ©ut 



but the real cause is the bread or the water. Jesus 
offers himself to you in your need as the bread 
and water of life. You stretch forth your hand, 
that is, your faith, in eager reception of this living 
bread and water. You live. But is the glory of 
your salvation to be attributed, in the last analysis, 
to your hand, your faith, or to the living bread 
and water? Surely to the latter. Your faith is 
an instrumental cause, but the real cause, after all 
is said and done, is the "bread of life which came 
down from heaven of which if a man eat he shall 
live forever." He is the Alpha and the Omega of 
your salvation. To him be all the glory. Amen. 

The results of its reception are most refreshing 
and blessed. Among them the Apostle mentions 
the "peaceable fruit of righteousness." "The 
peace of God, which passeth all understanding, 
shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ 
Jesus." There will be peace in the soul, peace be- 
tween souls, and peace between the soul and God. 
And when this becomes universal, as it will, for 
he is to reign "from the river unto the ends of the 
earth," then under the benign sceptre of the 
"Prince of Peace" there shall be "nothing to hurt 
or to destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the 
Lord." 

And your crowning time will be by and by when 
the crown of righteousness will be placed upon 

151 



OoVs Mas <smt 



your brow. "For I am now ready to be 
offered," said the great Apostle, "and the time of 
my departure is at hand." 

"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my 
course, I have kept the faith : 

"Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of 
righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous 
judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me 
only, but unto all them also that love his appear- 
ing." 



152 



CHAPTER XII. 

JUSTIFICATION. 

"Therefore being justified by faith, we have 
peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." 
Here then the Apostle introduces you to justifi- 
cation. It will be well for you to have an intelli- 
gent grasp of this doctrine, having to do, as it 
does, with your standing before God and the 
reasons therefor. This will so confirm you in the 
truth, as to the way of life, that there will be in- 
sured to you greater restfulness, comfort, peace, 
as well as a larger, more grateful and fruitful 
recognition of Christ as the author and finisher 
of your faith. 

As a matter of fact, it is already settled by your 
believing acceptance of Christ as your redeemer. 
Your standing now before God is that of one who 
has been "justifed freely by his grace through 
the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Your 
heart gives him glory and sings his praise, but if 
your head reinforces your heart by a larger in- 
sight into the ways of God towards you, as re- 
vealed in his word, your praise will be richer in 

153 



Oofc's Mas Qwt 



volume, as your whole being will be called more 
fully into play. "Bless the Lord, O my soul : and 
all that is within me, bless his holy name." All 
the varied faculties with which God has endowed 
you are thus to reinforce each other in giving him 
glory. 

As to the importance of the fact of justification 
before God — this was emphasized in the opening 
chapter. All history, sacred and profane, attests 
it. The question of the ages has been, "How 
shall man be just before God." But being bless- 
edly assured, experimentally, by the faith of 
Christ, so far as each believer is concerned, there 
yet remains to be possessed such knowledge of its 
nature as will confirm your faith, deepen your 
reverential devotion, enlarge your adoring esti- 
mate of his grace, and quicken you to more fully 
and joyfully "Crown him Lord of all." 

In justification you become before God a holy 
and righteous person not actually but legally or 
in God's estimation. "There is therefore now no 
condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus." 
You have passed over from death to life, from 
bondage to liberty, from being an alien to sonship, 
adopted into God's household of redeemed chil- 
dren through grace. Your state has been changed 
from being that of a sinner condemned to that of 
a sinner justified. And in all accusations and con- 

i54 



OoVs TOlap ©ut 



troversies that may arise concerning you, from 
any or all adverse powers in the universe, God 
will now stand by you. You have already been 
adjudged by him as being a free man of Christ — 
your allegiance transferred from Satan unto God. 
In law you are now a subject — and a willing one, 
for he would have no other — of the King eternal, 
immortal and invisible, as truly as are the saints 
in glory. 

All your sins are laid on Christ so that your 
standing before God is that of a sinless person. 
There is no sin on you, but, being in him "not 
having your own righteousness which is of the 
law but that which is through the faith of Christ, 
the righteousness which is of God by faith" then, 
in relation to the claims of divine justice, as he is 
"so also are you in this world" — even holy, harm- 
less and undefiled. 

But in point of fact you are still sinful and in 
momentary need of his forgiveness. The Lord's 
prayer is always in order on this side of heaven. 
But your actual condition will be gradually ap- 
proaching your legal standing until finally you 
will be sinless in fact as in law. That is your 
goal. For this Christ came into the world, lived, 
died, rose again and intercedes. All has been 
done that his people might be saved from their 
sins, from their presence and power as well as 

155 



GoVs Mas <S>ut 



guilt, that there might neither be sin in them nor 
on them. "Who shall lay anything to the charge 
of God's elect? It is God that justifieth." Now 
in this justification which you receive from God 
the pardon of your sin is included, but that is not 
all there is to it. You might be pardoned without 
being justified but you cannot be justified without 
being pardoned. 

The pardoning power, for example, is resident 
in the chief executive of the state. Here is a con- 
demned criminal for whom a pardon is sought. 
The chief magistrate in the exercise of his sover- 
eignty and clemency, grants it. The criminal is 
thereby restored to his liberty and rights as a 
citizen of the state. But is he thereby justified? 
By no means. His guilt remains. So also his un- 
righteousness. On the basis of what he is, he is 
not entitled to be thus treated. Were his case to 
be acted on by a judge it would not issue thus. No 
change may have been wrought in the man and 
the pardon is a sovereign act granted without ref- 
erence to any claim of the criminal on the basis 
of justice or righteousness. 

But in your justification the case is different. 
You become the free man of Christ, a member of 
the household of faith, you have the rights of citi- 
zenship in the commonwealth of Israel restored 
to you, not simply because God in the exercise of 



156 



Gob's Was <S>ut 



his sovereign clemency elects to so do, without 
reference to anything by which you may be en- 
titled thereto. Not at all. If God justifies you 
and you go forth a free man, enjoying the rights 
of citizenship, it is because you are entitled to this. 
To do otherwise would be unjust to you. In his 
capacity of judge God declares that you are guilt- 
less and that your standing as to righteousness is 
such that justice would be perverted into injustice 
were you to remain longer under condemnation. 
You are made free on the basis of righteousness 
and without it you could not be. But this does 
not mean that you, yourself, are actually holy or 
righteousness in character and that God does as 
he does because of what you thus are. What it 
does mean we shall shortly see. But that it does 
not mean that you are of God declared to be just, 
and treated accordingly, because of what you are 
or do, you may freely and fully gather from the 
express teaching of his word. 

Antecedently to such teaching you might so 
conclude from what has already been taught as to 
faith and your own experience of its reality. You 
are not the author neither yet are you the finisher 
of your faith. If you were, then the glory of your 
salvation would be your own. But God declares 
that his glory will he not give to another. The 
crown which belongs to another is not to be put 



i57 



Oo&'s Ma^ <S>ut 



on your head, either by your own hand or by that 
of any one else. 

And as with your faith, so with your justifica- 
tion and all else which pertains to your salvation 
from the guilt, power and presence of sin. From 
beginning to end God alone is to be exalted and 
glorified. "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, 
but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and 
for thy truth's sake." 

That you are not to put any confidence in the 
flesh, or base any expectations of justification 
upon its works, or regard them as the ground or 
reason why God should declare and treat you as 
justified before him, is evident, for example, from 
such Scriptures as the following: "Not by works 
of righteousness which we have done, but accord- 
ing to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of 
regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost." 
And, more especially "Knowing that a man is not 
justified by the works of the law, but by the faith 
of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus 
Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of 
Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by 
the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." 
Here evidently, works of all kinds are excluded. 
If God declares you just before him and treats 
you accordingly, it is not because of anything 
meritorious in you moving him thereto. You are 



158 



GoVs TKHa£ ©ut 



not thus to have reason for glorifying. "Not of 
works lest any man should boast." "Where is 
boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? 
Of works? Nay: but by the law of faith.'' 
"Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by 
faith without the deeds of the law." Faith and 
works cannot share it between them. It must go 
exclusively to the one or to the other. And God 
gives it to faith. So your works must be put off, 
for the place whereon thou standest is holy. 

So also will this be borne in upon your mind 
and heart forcefully from what the Scriptures 
affirm as to the entirely gracious character of your 
salvation. If it be all of the grace of God, as the 
Bible asserts, then how can your works, how can 
what you are or do righteously claim any share 
of the glory? God is not going to divide the 
honors with you. If it be of grace it cannot pos- 
sibly be of works ; and if of works then not possi- 
bly of grace, for these terms mutually exclude 
each other. And so the Apostle says, "If by 
grace, then is it no more of works; otherwise 
grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, 
then is it no more grace; otherwise work is no 
more work." And also, "Now to him that work- 
eth is the reward not reckoned of grace but of 
debt." 

There is absolutely nothing left here on which 

159 



(Soft's TRUa^ ©ut 



the hope of entering a justified state can be built, 
so far as your own merit is concerned. The 
Scripture representation is constantly to the ef- 
fect that the ground of your acceptance as a jus- 
tified person before God, is not within you but out- 
side of you. It is on the basis of something which 
has been done for you instead of anything done 
by you or accomplished in you. 

"Much more then, being now justified by his 
blood, we shall be saved from wrath through 
him." The justifying cause here is asserted to be 
the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus — a cause 
external to yourself. So also in the same chap- 
ter, Rom. v, verses 18 and 19, the fact that the 
ground of your justification is not within but 
without you, is affirmed. "Therefore as by the 
offence of one judgment came upon all men to 
condemnation; even so by the righteousness of 
one the free gift came upon all men unto justifi- 
cation of life." That is, not on the basis of your 
righteousness, but because of the righteousness of 
another. "For as by one man's disobedience many 
were made sinners, so by the obedience of one 
shall many be made righteous." Again, it is not 
for your obedience that you are accepted as just 
with God, but because of the obedience of another. 
That is, as here taught and taught throughout the 
Scriptures, you must look elsewhere than within 

160 



Gob's Was ©tit 



the circle of your own being and doing for the 
reason why, before God, you are now regarded 
as a just person from whom the sentence of con- 
demnation has been righteously removed. 

This being so, the query naturally arises — 
where are we to look? And the only Scriptural 
answer that can be given, an answer that finds a 
response in the heart of every sincere Christian 
believer, is that it is because of the righteousness 
of Christ. You are "accepted in the beloved." 
To you, as a believer, "Christ has become the end 
of the law for righteousness." And the justifica- 
tion that comes to you because of the righteous- 
ness of your Lord you are not to understand as 
making you righteous. That is, your character is 
not so immediately affected thereby that from an 
unrighteous or unholy person, in fact, you be- 
come at once changed into a righteous or holy 
character. Your character will, of course, be af- 
fected by your new relationship to God in Christ. 
But that will be a progressive affair. You will 
be gradually changed into the same image from 
glory to glory even as by the Spirit of the Lord.'' 

But your justification refers, not to a change 

of character, but to a change of state. Because 

of the righteousness of Christ you are declared 

of God free from the condemning sentence of the 

law. "There is therefore now no condemnation 
11 

161 



<3oV& TCHas <§>ut 



to them who are in Christ Jesus." The condemna- 
tion was borne by him, and you, being in him by 
faith, "not having your own righteousness which 
is of the law but that which is through the faith 
of Jesus Christ" — then you also were condemned 
in and with him and will not be condemned a sec- 
ond time. When he, and you in him, bore the con- 
demnation of God for sin it was "once for all." 
Neither the atoning sacrifice nor the condemnation 
will ever be repeated. "Nor yet that he should 
offer himself often, as the high-priest entereth 
into the holy place every year with blood of 
others; "For then must he often have suffered 
since the foundation of the world : but now once 
in the end of the world hath he appeared to put 
away sin by the sacrifice of himself." 

You are then, for the sake of the righteous- 
ness of Christ, declared of God to be righteously 
free from condemnation. You have a right to 
liberty — the liberty of Christ. And to this change 
of state — not change of character — the Scriptures 
give the name of justification. To the query, 
"How shall a man be just with God?" this is the 
only and all sufficient answer. Being justified 
freely by his grace through the redemption that is 
in Christ Jesus." 

Your justification, then, rests not on what you 
are or do, not on what is within you, but on what 

162 



Gob's Was ©ut 



Christ is and has done, that is, on what is ex- 
ternal to you — all of which becomes yours by 
faith. You are just, because you are "found in 
him not having your own righteousness which is 
of the law, but, that which is through the faith of 
Christ." "As he is, so are you in this world." 
You are free, so far as all legal claim against 
you, on account of sin, is concerned. The law's 
demands are satisfied and you walk the earth as 
the freeman of Christ, as a son of God, accepted 
in the beloved. 

When you thus appropriate Christ by faith so 
that the perfection of his obedience and atoning 
sacrifice becomes yours — his righteousness is 
said, in the Scripture, to be imputed to you. 
That is, it is so laid to your account that God 
deals with you as being sinless, so far as the right 
of the law to condemn you is concerned. You are 
treated as if it were actually yours. And it is 
yours. God makes it yours when you receive 
Christ by faith. But not in the sense that your 
inner nature or character is yet fully changed and 
made conformable in all things to the image of 
Christ. That change, which is to be wrought in 
you, will be gradually effected by the word and 
Spirit of God, as you will be dying unto sin and 
living unto righteousness. 

And, finally, in his immediate presence, your 



163 



God's TOPlay ©ut 



inner character, as well as your outward standing 
before God, shall be sinless — neither sin in you 
nor on you. 

The imputation, then, of the righteousness of 
your Lord changes your standing before God — 
your state, but not your character. From being an 
alien, you become at once a citizen of the common- 
wealth of Israel and are fully entitled to the priv- 
ileges thereof. Paul, in Romans, quoting David 
in reference to this says: "Even as David also 
describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom 
God imputeth righteousness without works, 

"Saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are 
forgiven, and whose sins are covered. 

"Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not 
impute sin.'' 

And in 2 Cor., 5 :ig, "God was in Christ recon- 
ciling the world unto himself not imputing their 
trespasses unto them." 

It is then because of the righteousness of the 
Lord Jesus, affirmed by the Scripture to be im- 
puted to you, that your standing before God be- 
comes that of a just or justified person. The 
glory of your high estate, as one of God's free- 
men, belongs, not to you but to your Lord. 

"To suppose that a man is justified by his own 
virtue or obedience derogates from the honor of 
the Mediator, and ascribes that to man's virtue 



164 



<3oD's Mas ©ut 



which belongs only to the righteousness of Christ. 
It puts man in Christ's stead, and makes him his 
own Saviour, in a respect in which Christ only is 
the Saviour: and so it is a doctrine contrary to 
the nature and design of the gospel, which is to 
abase man, and to ascribe all the glory of our sal- 
vation to Christ the Redeemer." 

"My hope is built on nothing less 
Than Jesus blood and righteousness; 

I dare not trust the sweetest frame, 
But wholly lean on Jesus' name, 

On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; 
All other ground is sinking sand." 

"When he shall come with trumpet sound, 

O, may I then in Him be found ; 
Drest in his righteousness alone, 

Faultless to stand before the throne. 
On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; 

All other ground is sinking sand." 



165 



CHAPTER XIII. 



WARFARE 



The prey has been taken from the mighty and 
the lawful capture has been delivered. Your 
standing before God is now that of a righteous 
person. Christ has become "the end of the law 
for righteousness" to you as a believer. You are 
"complete in him" as to your acceptance, your 
freedom from condemnation, your assurance of 
full and eternal salvation from all evil in the im- 
mediate presence of God. God is now "for you" 
and "who can be against you" with any well- 
grounded hope of final success? No one can 
pluck you out of your Father's hand. "Who shall 
separate you from the love of Christ ?" You may 
be persuaded "that neither death, nor life, nor 
angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things 
present, nor things to come, 

"Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, 
shall be able to separate you from the love of 
God, which is in Christ Jesus your Lord." 

But the effort will nevertheless be made from 
sheer enmity to God and holiness as well as to 

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you in view of your new relations, tastes, aims 
and character. You have been ''translated into 
the kingdom of God's dear Son," brought from 
bondage to liberty, from darkness to light, from 
allegiance to sin and satan to the obedience of 
Christ, from being a citizen of one kingdom to 
citizenship in another. The old order has ceased 
and you have become a new creature in Christ 
Jesus. But it still remains true that the actual, 
full and final realization of all that is involved in 
your changed estate is not yet. "Thou shalt call 
his name JESUS for he shall save his people 
from their sins." 

Although sin, by the grace of your Lord, has 
been dethroned, its power shaken to the founda- 
tion, so that it shall no more "reign unto death," 
yet it is by no means fully ejected, and is not only 
capable of doing, but certainly will do much to 
trouble and perplex you. Wherefore "think it 
not strange concerning the fiery trial which is 
to try you, as though some strange thing hap- 
pened unto you." Let your hope and your faith 
be in God. Amid sin's desperate onslaught you 
will have frequent occasion to say with the 
Psalmist : "Why art thou cast down, O my soul ? 
and why art thou disquieted within me? hope 
thou in God : for I shall yet praise him, who is the 
health of my countenance, and my God." 



167 



Gob's TKHas ®ut 



While, on the one hand, with a triumphant 
faith, you may sing: 

Bless God, O my soul, from sin's guilt thou art free, 
'Tis gone once for all, it no more shalt thou see, 

O blessed salvation ! no more need'st thou fear 
The voice of the Lord, thy Redeemer, to hear. 

Bless the Lord, O my soul, for sin's broken power, 
No more shall it reign undisturbed from this hour, 

"Thy Redeemer is strong," to him shall it yield, 
His sceptered dominion shall now claim the field. 

Bless God, O my soul, for the hope he has given, 
A hope "sure and steadfast" and anchored in heav'n — 

That yet, in his presence, from sin all set free, 
Thy King, in his beauty, my soul, thou shalt see. 

O blessed salvation ! from sin's guilt and power, 
O blessed salvation ! when cleansed evermore, 

Thrice blessed salvation! from sin's guilt, power, stain, 
Thine Lord, be the glory, Amen and Amen. 

Yet, on the other hand, sin being of the devil, 
whether within you or without you, will wage 
such relentless warfare upon you that to you at 
times no more than to Paul will there be freedom 
from the oppressed cry, "Who shall deliver me 
from this body of death?" You may be so 
"brought into captivity to the law of sin which is 
in your members" as to penitently put forth the 
agonized supplication: 

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Gob's Was ©ut 



Leave me not God of mercy, 

Sorely do I need thee near; 
Not in anger but compassion, 

Bow Thou unto me Thine ear. 

Needy breathings, mid my struggles, 

Rise to Thee, or, mute I lie, 
Trampled o'er by foes tyrannic, — 

Lord have mercy ! or I die. 

Gracious Lord ! to Thee a traitor ! 

Heeding not to "watch and pray," 
Parleying with the foe, repenting, 

When, alas ! was lost the day. 

Not this once, but times unnumbered, 

Have I thus dishonored Thee; 
Justly then, Lord, I acknowledge, 

Thou might'st now abandon me. 

Yet long suffering, slow to anger, 
Thou'rt not willing I should die, 

Thus believing, I still upward 
Unto Thee will lift mine eye. 

But with the triumphant faith of Paul, exclaim- 
ing amid the fierce conflict, "I thank God through 
Jesus Christ my Lord," so will you be privileged 
through faith to conclude your penitent prayer 
with the victorious strain : 

Cease, my foes, then your exulting, 

Fallen thus, I yet shall rise, 
Christ hath died, through Him I'll conquer, 

And yet enter Paradise. 

i 169 



©ob'5 Mas ©ut 



I need not, of course, enlarge on the fact that 
for varied reasons, the servants of Christ will ex- 
perience differences in the degree of intensity 
with which they will have to wage this warfare. 
To one, the u good fight of faith'' will not nearly 
be so severe as to another, neither may it be so 
trying at one time as at another for the same 
person. The experience of God's children, 
whether recorded or unwritten, abundantly tes- 
tifies this. But in some measure the warfare must 
be waged by all because of sin's presence and ac- 
tivity. 

Nevertheless, in the midst of it, "according to 
your faith" will the "peace of God keep your 
heart and mind through Christ Jesus." 

You may be "hunted like a partridge on the 
mountains," as David was, but you will escape 
as he did "from the snare of the fowler" and 
enter through grace the full fruitions of the King- 
dom ordained of God for you. Had you not be- 
come a candidate for a "crown of righteousness" 
you might have remained comparatively undis- 
turbed by the powers of evil, but it would have 
been the stagnant peace of spiritual death. Better 
the spirit tossings of warfare with sin because of 
the life and returning health and strength in- 
volved. The following homely illustration per- 
tinentlv reveals the difference. 



170 



GoVs Was ©ut 



An infidel judge, and his colored servant went 
duck hunting one day. Sambo was a Christian 
and sometimes troubled with a varied assort- 
ment of Christian conflicts. The judge was not 
and told Sambo so. He asked the colored man 
why it was that he and other Christians were thus 
troubled at times. He thought that he was better 
off than they. That question floored the colored 
man for the time being. He was silent. After 
awhile they came to a covey of ducks and the 
judge blazed away, killing one and wounding an- 
other. The judge called to the colored man, "You 
jump in Sambo and get that wounded duck before 
he gets off," but he paid no attention to the dead 
one. Sambo did so and came back in a brown 
study. "I hab im now Massa, Ise able to show 
you how de Christian hab greater conflict den de 
infidel. Don't you know de moment you wounded 
dat ar duck, how anxious you was to get im out, 
and you didn't care for de dead duck, but jes lef 
im alone. You see dat ar dead duck was a sure 
thing. Now Ise wounded and I tries to get away 
from de debbil. It takes trouble to cotch me, but 
Massa, you are a dead duck, dar is no squabble 
for you, de debbil hab you shuah !" 

Troubled with conflicts, as you may be, you 
will be brought thereby to a wider outlook, a 
larger room, a fuller life. So the Psalmist af- 



171 



6ofc's Was ©ut 



firms : "Thou hast caused men to ride over our 
heads ; we went through fire and through water ; 
but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place." 

In the natural world you have at times felt the 
pressure of climatic conditions. You could not 
breathe freely. You felt as if in a prison from 
which you would fain break away but could not. 
Then the horizon darkens, the heavens gather 
blackness, and soon there is the flashing of light- 
ning, the crashing of thunder and the onward 
sweep of a great tempest. But the storm-king 
passes and the gentle radiance of the sun again 
illumines the world. Myriad pearly drops depend 
from grass and shrub and tree and glad bird 
songs are again ascending to God. While breath- 
ing the now purified and invigorating air you 
realize that for the boon of such a regeneration 
the climatic disturbance was a boon to be wel- 
comed. 

And so, while in the life of the spirit you may 
be called upon to struggle with the elements of 
death, the very disturbance and storminess there- 
of, under the guiding hand of God, will be the 
means of your deliverance. You will be led into 
the joy of a confirmed faith, and assured hope, a 
deeper love. The songs of spiritual gladness, as 
in that of refreshed nature, will arise in your 



172 



Gob's Was ©ut 



heart as tributes to the good and guiding hand 
of the Father, who, through the darkness and the 
tossings and perplexities of life, is leading you 
out into the light and the peace and the glory. 

A tired pilgrim you may often be in your jour- 
ney, perhaps, with burning sands under foot and 
a scorching sun over head, but you will be 
cheered and invigorated by the refreshing foun- 
tains, the verdure, the kindly shade of many an 
oasis along the way. The inspired record of the 
saints of God attests this. And the testimony is 
not thus limited. It is universal. "Threads are 
sometimes stretched in windows to make iEolian 
harps. While the air is calm and still there is no 
music. But when the wind blows softly a faint 
murmur of music is heard ; and the stronger the 
wind the louder and sweeter the melody becomes. 
It is so with many human hearts. "The purest, 
sweetest, holiest joy I ever witnessed in mortal 
on earth was in one, who, for fourteen years, had 
been sitting in her chair, unable to lift hand or 
foot. All these years her heart had been com- 
muning with God and the sorrows that beat upon 
the chords of her soul struck out songs which 
might have fallen from an angel's tongue." 

See yonder rivulet working its way through 
the narrow defiles of the mountains. It may be 



173 



Gob's TKHaE ©ut 



hindered and driven backward in portions of its 
course. But it seeks the ocean. And it ultimate- 
ly finds it after all its devious wanderings. 

And so, Christ being formed in you as the hope 
of glory, your home is the bosom of God. Thither 
will you tend and move through all the experi- 
ences of the mortal life. In him will your life 
broaden and deepen in the limitless sweep of the 
Beyond. 

But look a little more in detail at the elements 
of the warfare and its results. While you are 
not to wrestle with flesh and blood in the usual ac- 
ceptance of those terms, and while the weapons 
of your warfare "are not carnal but spiritual," yet 
the descriptive settings of it are in terms of the 
natural life and warfare. This is in harmony 
with the general usage of the Scriptures. The 
things that are spiritual are set forth under 
imagery borrowed from the earthly life, out of 
gracious accommodation to the weakness of our 
apprehension regarding the things of the unseen 
world. 

Warfare, of course, implies enemies. In this 
case they are numerous, mighty, resourceful and 
persistent. When you read the Psalms all this is 
vividly and forcibly brought home to you. What 
a record they are of the assaults of foes and of the 
varied fortunes of the conflict. You there get, as 

i74 



6ot>'5 TKHas <§>ut 



it were, a bird's eye view of the whole field with 
the movements and issues of the contending 
forces of light and darkness. "Principalities, 
powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world, 
spiritual wickedness in high places" are mar- 
shalled there. They are sometimes classified as 
"the world, the flesh and the devil." Here is a 
great trinity of evil with no disposition to show 
quarter. They are merciless and relentless in the 
endeavor to compass the destruction of all spir- 
itual good. And their equipment is marvelous. 
"The wiles of the devil." "O full of all subtlety 
and all mischief, thou child of the devil." "Now 
the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the 
field which the Lord God had made." 

"For there shall arise false Christs and false 
prophets, and shall shew great signs and won- 
ders; in so much that, if it were possible, they 
shall deceive the very elect." 

"For such are false prophets, deceitful work- 
ers, transforming themselves into the apostles of 
Christ." 

"And no marvel: for Satan himself is trans- 
formed into an angel of light." "And a man's 
foes shall be they of his own household." 

You cannot but realize the danger of the situ- 
ation when the foe is within the gates of man- 
soul as well as without. The most distressing, the 



175 



Cob's Was Qui 



most uncivil of all conflicts is what is called "civil 
war." And here, right at the fountain head of 
your life, you have a heart which is described as 
being 'deceitful above all things and desperately 
wicked" which you are requested to "Keep with 
all diligence for out of it are the issues of life." 
When right at home, within you, in your own na- 
ture, there is a "law in your members warring 
against the law of your mind and bringing you 
into captivity to the law of sin which is in your 
members," you may well realize that the conflict 
is desperate, that it is war to the death on both 
sides. Enemies within playing into the hand of 
enemies without and both of them, at times, ap- 
pearing as your friends instead of foes, if perad- 
venture thereby you may be deceived and suffer 
loss. Bodily appetites and passions marshalled 
into the service of the devil, as well as all the 
sinful tendencies of the soul irrespective of bodily 
relations, the allurements of a world "lying in 
wickedness" and the hosts of evil of the world 
invisible under the leadership of the fierce, cruel, 
deceitful, subtle, wicked and powerful prince of 
devils — such an array is truly appalling. 
. In the light of such a dread fact you will not 
readily conclude that the life of faith unto which 
you are called is to be a holiday affair. The life 
of a soldier engaged in an active campaign, in real 



176 



Oofc's Wa^ <S>ut 



warfare, does not surprise men if it have many 
hardships. That is expected. The wonder would 
be were it otherwise. Nor must you expect less 
of the spiritual warfare. All the language of 
Scripture regarding it is such that if you do ex- 
pect immunity therefrom you will be rudely 
awakened to a great disappointment. A surprise 
is in store for you. 

But better this than to go on sleeping and 
dreaming of peace when there is no peace. In 
the conduct of the "good fight of faith" you will 
be under the necessity of exercising the soldierly 
qualities needed in the presence of an alert and 
powerful foe. If you do not, loss and captivity 
will be experienced. So do not be surprised at 
any of the hardships of the campaign "as though 
some strange thing happened to you." "But re- 
joice, inasmuch as you are a partaker of Christ's 
sufferings ; that, when his glory shall be revealed, 
you may be glad also with exceeding joy." 

Your life in this relation will be somewhat of a 
paradox. Amid all these apparently untoward 
conditions, these clashings and grapplings with 
evil, this field of spiritual carnage, it will still be 
your blessed privilege to experience the peace of 
God which will "keep your heart and mind 
through Christ Jesus." "Peace I leave with you, 
my peace I give unto you : not as the world giv- 

12 

177 



©ob's waa^ ©ut 



eth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be 
troubled, neither let it be afraid." "Thou wilt 
keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed 
on thee ; because he trusteth in thee." "The Lord 
will bless his people with peace." "The Lord 
will speak peace unto his people." Your life will 
be "hid with Christ in God." The innermost cen- 
ter of your being will be in the "eye of the storm," 
where all is at rest. So that from this inner 
sanctuary, this pavilion of God in which he hides 
you, you will go forth as a strong man to run a 
race, rejoicing with confidence in the salvation of 
Him who "teacheth your hands to war and your 
fingers to fight." 

The war is to be waged on offensive as well as 
defensive lines. You are not simply to hold your 
own, but you are to make conquests. You are to 
wrest victory from the dominion of the enemy. 
You are to go up and possess the land even though 
the giant sons of Anak are there and you be in 
your own estimation as a grasshopper before 
them. You will be able to do this not because of 
your own sword or bow, but because of the Lord 
your God, who will fight for you and fill you with 
the invincible might of his own right arm. "And 
this is the victory which overcometh the world 
even your faith." "Ever looking unto Jesus the 



178 



Soft's TRUa^ ©ut 



Author and finisher of your faith" — there is the 
secret of your conquering power. 

That you are to "move on the enemies' works" 
is evident because of Christ's example, whom you 
are to follow. He came that he "might destroy 
the works of the devil." To do this he had to be 
aggressive. He did not come into this world to 
let satan alone. The let alone policy would suit 
the prince of darkness very well, but your Lord 
was not here to indulge him after that fashion. 
Neither must you. Your own welfare depends on 
"carrying the war into Africa." 

In the synagogue, as mentioned in Mark I : 
23-26, our Lord stood in the presence of a devil 
possessed soul. They cried out "Let us alone," 
but the Lord came into the world for the express 
purpose of not letting the devil alone. So he im- 
mediately assailed him. "Come out of him." And 
with much crying and disturbance he came out. 
Notwithstanding the throes incident to the ejec- 
tion the man was the better for it. "And you hath 
he quickened who were dead in trespasses and in 
sins." Being quickened, you stand as a repre- 
sentative of your Lord in the presence of a sin- 
cursed and devil possessed world, which cries out 
"Let us alone." But as you are to carry on an 
offensive warfare in your own soul, so as to 



179 



Ood's WLav ©ut 



''bring into captivity every thought to the obedi- 
ence of Christ," likewise, so much as in you lies, 
are you to do similar service for a "world lying in 
wickedness." The devil in the world is to feel 
the ejecting power of your character. And the 
divine that is in you will not speak to "none ef- 
fect." Satan has heard the summons and with 
much noise and disturbance he is leaving and will 
continue to leave this poor sin-cursed race, and 
a better life will issue. At times he makes a fear- 
ful din in the social life of men, so much so that 
you might fear that "the earth and all the inhab- 
itants thereof were to be dissolved," were it not 
for your faith that God is "bearing up the pillars 
thereof." Spare not for his crying, for his ejec- 
tion, root and branch, means that there will be 
"nothing to hurt or destroy in all God's holy 
mountain." Christ will then "come to his own 
and his own will receive him." 

The word of God is to have free course and be 
glorified in every nook and corner of your own 
being and in every department of the world's 
life. It was written in Hebrew and Greek and 
Latin — languages representative of the religious, 
educational and governmental life of mankind — 
that Jesus was King. Prophetic words. Satan is 
to be cast out and Jesus is to be enthroned every- 
where. But this implies aggressive, offensive 

180 



<3oV& TWlas <S>ut 



warfare, as well as defensive — in your own life 
as well as in the regions beyond. 

One of the features of the warfare which will 
encourage you is the fact that you are contending 
with a cowardly foe. You may now and again 
be put to a disadvantage by the "wiles of the 
devil," which you will need to watch, but face 
him squarely and he flees. "Resist the devil and 
he will flee from you." 

"Satan trembles when he sees 
The weakest saint upon his knees." 

"The wicked flee when no man pursueth, but 
the righteous are bold as a lion." To be on the 
wrong side and to know it, demoralizes an indi- 
vidual or an army. But to go forth conscious of 
the righteousness of your cause, or with a firm 
conviction thereof — this will imbue you with cour- 
age and lead to deeds of heroism. 

"What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted? 

Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just; 
And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel, 
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted." 

So that, with all their numbers and malignity, 
the hosts of evil are yet cowardly and will flee 
before you. 

But this holds good only in so far as you are 

181 



GoVb Mas <S>ut 



imbued with the life of Christ, animated by his 
Spirit and panoplied with the armor of God. 
Otherwise you will be shorn of your strength, 
become weak as other men, the Philistines will 
be upon you and you will be made to grind in the 
prison house of your enemies. You must never 
go unarmed, for a deadly enemy is constantly 
watching. The time is not yet 

"When you shall lay your armor by 
And rest with Christ at home." 

And in order to have you realize more fully 
your dependence on Christ, how he is the Author 
and finisher of your faith, the Alpha and the 
Omega of your salvation, you have but to examine 
the armor and see how its various parts find their 
equivalent in the fullness of your Lord. In Rom. 
13:14, the command is given to "put on the 
Lord Jesus Christ" and in Eph. 6: 11 to "put 
on the whole armor of God." Now look at the 
corresoondence between the two. What is the 
armor? "Your loins girt about with truth and 
having on the breastplate of righteousness ;" 

"And your feet shod with the preparation of 
the gospel of peace ;" 

"Above all, taking the shield of faith, where- 
with you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts 
of the wicked." 

182 



OoVs Mas ©ut 



"And take the helmet of salvation and the 
sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God ;" 

"Praying always with all prayer and supplica- 
tion in the Spirit and watching thereunto with all 
perseverance and supplication for all saints.'' 

How does the Lord Jesus answer to this? 
"Your loins girt about with truth." And Christ 
says, "I am the truth." "Having on the breast- 
plate of righteousness." And Christ in 1st Cor. : 
1-30 is said to "be made unto us righteousness." 
"And your feet shod with the preparation of the 
gospel of peace." In Eph. 2 114 Christ is declared 
to be "our peace." "Taking the shield of faith." 
And in speaking of Christ the Psalmist says, "Be- 
hold O God our shield and look upon the face of 
thine anointed." "And the helmet of salvation." 
The aged Simeon says of Christ as he beholds 
him in the temple, "Lord, now lettest thou thy 
servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen 
thy salvation." "And the sword of the Spirit 
which is the word of God." And of Christ it is 
said, "In the beginning was the word and the 
word was with God, and the word was God." 
And again in Rev. 19 113, "His name is called The 
Word of God." 

Yet with all this equipment and the cheering 
assurance that you are not alone, that your great 



183 



(Sob's TKIlas Out 



Friend will "never leave you nor forsake you," 
it still remains true that "eternal vigilance is the 
price of liberty" here as elsewhere. 

"Watch and pray lest ye enter into temptation." 
"And what I say unto you I say unto all, 
Watch." 

"O watch and fight and pray, 
The battle ne'er give o'er, 
Renew it boldly every day, 
And help divine implore." 

By the agency of such exercises, the influence 
of such heavenly associations and the companion- 
ship of Divine Personalities, your spiritual health 
will be confirmed and the varied hardships of the 
warfare be met with ever growing vigor. 

To be in "good form" for the struggles of the 
earthly life health of body is one of the essentials. 
For the maintenance of this attention must be 
given to the quality of the food eaten, the purity 
of the air which you are breathing as well as to 
the taking of appropriate exercise. 

Similarly in the spiritual life are you to give 
heed to those necessary requirements for the en- 
joyment thereof and for the more comfortable and 
successful accomplishment of its purposes. 

You must have wholesome food and receive 
your portion according to your daily need. 
"Bread shall be given him, his water shall be 

1 84 



Gob's Was ©ut 



sure" — even the "bread of life which came down 
from heaven" and the "living water which shall 
be in you a well of water springing up into ever- 
lasting life." 

Then there must be breathed daily the pure air 
of the heavenly places. This comes with its 
health bringing influence, purifying and enno- 
bling earthly relations and fellowships. "Blessed 
be God that even in this ruined world there are 
some places pervaded with a sweet and pure 
Christian atmosphere! — Christian homes and so- 
cieties and churches filled with the very air of 
heaven, in which the believer grows rapidly in 
grace and in the knowledge of the Lord; where 
the Bible is read and loved; where daily duties 
are performed as unto the Lord; where devout 
prayer, in secret and from the family altar, as- 
cends daily unto God ; where the Sabbath is a de- 
light; and where "holiness unto the Lord" is 
written over the doorway to the house ! Believ- 
ers who live in such an atmosphere as this are 
like the "tree planted by rivers of waters that 
bringeth forth his fruit in his season ; his leaf also 
shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall 
prosper." 

And to the daily reception of the heavenly 
bread and the inhaling of the pure air wafted 
from the heavenly places must there be added the 



185 



(Soft's May ©ut 



"exercising unto godliness" without which health 
of spirit can no more be enjoyed than that of the 
body without activities appropriate thereto. It is 
said of the Lord Jesus that He "went about do- 
ing good." And the good He did had a refer- 
ence to the things of this life as well as the life 
to come — to the bodies as well as to the souls of 
men. Go thou and do likewise, as love to God 
and thy neighbor may prompt thee, and thou shalt 
assuredly grow up into Him, the possessor of a 
healthy character and life before God and men. 

And now in view of all this equipment and ac- 
tivity, what will be the result? Will you or will 
you not be encouraged by the knowledge that you 
are not fighting in vain ? That the forces of right- 
eousness are gradually gaining control, while 
those of evil are retiring, with growing evidences 
of their contending for a "lost cause?" 

The Spirit of God has tersely foreshadowed the 
result in 2 Sam. 3:1, when recording the general 
issue of the conflict between the house of David 
and the house of Saul. "Now there was long war 
between the house of Saul and the house of 
David : but David waxed stronger, and the house 
of Saul waxed weaker and weaker." This is true 
both as to the triumph of the kingdom of Christ 
in the whole earth as well as in the whole of each 
individual believer. It is the will of God, even 

186 



Gofc's Was ©ut 



your sanctification. It is one of the fruits of 
faith for which you are indebted to the gracious 
presence and work of the Spirit. God working 
in you both to will and to do you are enabled by 
faith to work out your salvation in the "putting 
off the old man which is corrupt according to the 
deceitful lusts" and in "putting on the new man, 
which after God is created in righteousness and 
true holiness." "More and more the principles 
of evil, still infecting our nature, are removed and 
their power destroyed, while the principle of spir- 
itual life grows until it controls the thoughts, 
feelings and acts and brings the soul into con- 
formity to the image of Christ." In this process 
the soul may be grievously tried at times as is 
evident from the experience of the Apostle as 
given in Rom. Chap 7. But ultimately victory 
is sure through Christ. 

Yea Lord, — I know that Thy command 

To "watch and pray," — obeyed, 
Would hourly bring victorious joy 

O'er foes 'gainst me arrayed. 

Yet, knowing this, O sinful heart ! 

Why wilt thou, hour by hour, 
'Gainst light and love be captive led 

By passion's luring power? 

That which I would, — that do I not, 
That I would not,— I do, 



187 



Cob's TKHas Qwt 



In dumb despair I lie, or moan, 
Pierced by Thine arrows through. 

How long my heart, how long pursue 

This thorny path of sin? 
When will such bondage have an end? 

When watch and pray and win? 

From whence shall sure deliv'rance come? 

Whence freedom from this death? 
'Tis found! 'tis found! through Christ the Lordl 

Thank Him with latest breath. 

Thou say'st, "I'll never leave, nor yet 

Thee will I e'er forsake," 
For this, O heart of mine, rejoice, 

For this, my tongue awake. 

O Lord! how great Thy mercies are, 

Thy love beyond compare, 
To me amid a thousand falls, 

Extends thy gracious care. 

For this my soul will bless Thy name, 

And glory in Thy praise, 
For this will crown Thee Saviour King 

Unto th' eternal days. 

In heaven, after the final victory, your song 
will ascend "unto Him who loved you, and washed 
you from your sins in his own blood," 

"And made you a king and a priest unto God 
and his Father," and to Him will you ascribe the 

188 



OoVb TWlap ®\xt 



"glory and the dominion for ever and ever, 
Amen." 

To Thee the friend of sinners, 

Thou who my Saviour art, 
Will I ascribe the glory, 

And bind Thee to my heart. 

Because of Thy compassion 

And love beyond compare, 
From heav'n to earth Thou stooped'st 

And all my sins didst bear. 

My Prophet ! Thou hast shewn me 

The way, the truth, the life, 
And by Thy word and Spirit 

Didst end the deadly strife. 

My great High Priest, Thou gavest 

Thyself a sacrifice 
To blot out my transgressions 

And fit me for the skies. 

Up from the pit Thou brought'st me 

And from the miry clay, 
Firm on the Rock didst set me, 

Establishing my way. 

My King! Thou hast subdued me 

And my defense Thou art, 
Thou never wilt forsake me, 

Nor from my side depart. 

Thy presence Thou hast promised 
Forever to abide, 

189 



GoVs Mag ©ut 



"Lo I am with you alway" 
What ill can then betide? 

From death hast Thou redeemed me, 
My Prophet, Priest and King, 

From henceforth then forever 
Thy matchless grace I'll sing. 

Th' Alpha Thou of all my faith, 

And Thou th' Omega art, 
For this — what shall I render? 

"My son, give me thine heart." 

Yea Lord! for Thou art worthy, 

All glory be to Thee, 
My heart would fain adore Thee, 

Throughout eternity. 



190 



CHAPTER XIV. 



VICTORY. 



But, however successful the warfare, that is 
not the condition which you would deliberately 
choose as your abiding destiny, nor is it intended 
to be so by your everlasting Friend. 

In the spiritual warfare, as in any other, indi- 
vidual victories are helpfully inspiring. 

"Each victory will help you 
Some other to win." 

But individual victories, even, grow monoto- 
nous and your soul would tire of them were the 
necessity laid upon you to continue winning them 
unceasingly. We recognize the duty of warfare 
and we are grateful for the grace which has not 
only called us to engage in it but has also fur- 
nished us with all needed equipment and prom- 
ised continued help in its prosecution. We re- 
joice in the opportunities thus afforded for glori- 
fying our Lord. Yet it is our privilege not to 
deem all this as "our destined end or way." 
While it may be that through much tribulation 

191 



OoVs TOas Out 



you are to enter the Kingdom of God and while, 
with Paul, you may "glory in tribulations also," 
yet you are not called upon to do so for their 
own sake, but the rather for the sake of the 
precious something beyond to which they are in- 
strumental in leading you. "We glory in tribu- 
lations also" — but why? "Knowing that tribula- 
tion worketh" — many desirable qualities. It is 
not then your duty to regard the warfare unto 
which you are called and in which you are now 
engaged, as a condition in which to delight for 
its own sake, but the rather for the sake of the 
results to be achieved thereby. 

That it is not required of you to rest in battling, 
as the end to which you are called, even though 
you were uniformly victorious, which you are not, 
but that all individual victories are to end in a 
triumph which will be final — this is the great and 
sustaining inspiration which is to animate you. 
The word declares it. The command and example 
of Christ enforce it. "Be not weary in well do- 
ing." And well doing is, of necessity, well fight- 
ing. But why not be weary? "For in due sea- 
son we shall reap." The otherwise flagging en- 
ergy amid life's burdens is sustained by an in- 
spiring Beyond to which they lead. In "due sea- 
son" there will be an end of all strivings and you 



192 



Oofc's Was ©ut 



will enter into the final and abiding fruitions of 
all antecedent individual efforts and victories. 

This encouraging hope is implied in the com- 
mand of your Lord, "Occupy till I come." 

"O watch and fight and pray, 
The battle ne'er give o'er, 
Renew it boldy every day, 
And help divine implore." 

Assuredly this is your purpose and your loyal 
daily endeavor. But the query will still return, 
"How long Lord, how long must I battle? Am 
I to be watching and fighting and praying for 
ever ? Is there to be no end, even to the winning 
of victories ? Will there not come a final victory 
when the enemy will be forever vanquished and 
the disturbing presence of evil from thenceforth 
be a thing eternally unknown ?" 

And the sufficient answer is "Occupy till I 
come." Your fighting occupancy of life's battle- 
field is thus limited. This is encouraging, al- 
though variously appreciated amid this life's al- 
lurements. With your life tides flowing strongly 
and the sanguine and generous impulses of your 
physical and spiritual youth bathing your chival- 
rous endeavors in the roseate hues of high hopes, 
you are willing, yea even eager, to "renew it bold- 

13 



193 



(BoD's Wag Qui 



ly every day" and that too, indefinitely. And this 
is well. Well for you and the work. But the 
query is still legitimate — "how long?" Shall we 
say a century? After the day's toil people find 
it needful and pleasant to rest. Will there ever a 
time come when the thought and fact of rest from 
the conflicts and wearying toils of the spirit will 
be welcome? Under the burdens of the present, 
which may have naught to do with strivings 
against sin and a seeking for conformity to God, 
there are yet those who would gladly welcome the 
grave and would fain be at rest "under the clods 
of the valley." Many there be who are weary of 
the present and who at times hasten to be rid of it 
by self-destruction without an assured hope of a 
restful Beyond. But you are enabled, amid life's 
ills, "to do and endure as seeing him who is in- 
visible.'' Yea even to rejoice amid tribulations 
through the sustaining grace and high hopes of 
the gospel. But amid it all, as, daily and contin- 
uously, you are finding "a law in your members 
warring against the law of your mind and bring- 
ing you into captivity to the law of sin which is 
in your members," will there never a time come 
when there will be a growing fascination for you 
in the fact that "there is a rest that remaineth for 
the people of God?" If you do not so feel at 
present perhaps at the end of a century you might 

194 



Gofc's Was ©ut 



begin to indulge the desire. If not, then say two 
centuries. Or how long would you wish the bat- 
tle of life to continue? Interminably? Your 
Lord has taken your need into merciful considera- 
tion and affirms that the conflict is a limited one. 
You are to occupy only until he comes. 

Soldiers have appreciated the limitations of con- 
flict on the battlefields of this world. A general 
who occupied a very trying position in one of the 
severest battles of the American Civil War gave 
public expression to this. He was not a Christian 
when the battle occurred but fully so at the time 
of the narration. While the carnage was going 
on he said he prayed earnestly if ever he prayed 
in his life. And for what? For the sun to set. 
He was "occupying" as best he could and deter- 
mined to continue it, but he did not desire to go 
on indefinitely. 

Wellington at Waterloo was "occupying" with 
all determination, heroically. But think you did 
he wish this to continue? Nay, nay, while so 
doing he was yet looking and longing for the 
coming of Blucher. And Blucher comes. The 
last charge is made. The final victory is won. 
And Europe says to Wellington, "Well done." 

But you are to be animated for the occupancy 
by a two-fold attitude of soul. This will be your 
inspiration and safeguard. 



i95 



GOVS TKaas Out 



You are to fight hopefully because your Lord 
is coming. Blucher might not have come. Wel- 
lington might not have been able to win. The 
b 1 world's "Well Dones" may not be forthcoming. 
But your Lord will unfailingly come. And by his 
grace you will hold the field until he does come. 
"He will come, he will not tarry," 

But you are also to watch yourself lest you 
grow careless because of his absence and be 
tempted to self-indulgence and a playing into the 
hands of the enemy. If hope is to cheer you so 
also is fear to move you. These elements are 
much appealed to in the Scriptures in the accom- 
plishing of your salvation. There is a tendency 
in fallen human nature to grow remiss in the ab- 
sence of an immediately present restraining in- 
fluence or responsibility. It is operative in the 
things of this life and is not absent when those of 
the life to come are at issue. For example, when 
you go abroad and the old associations and influ- 
ences of the home life are removed, the new life 
may not be so exemplary as the old. In school 
life children, ordinarily models of good beha- 
viour, have availed themselves of the teacher's 
temporary absence from the room to engage in all 
manner of pranks. But sometimes the teacher re- 
turns at a time unlooked for and then there is a 
reckoning. 



196 



(Sob's TOas ©ut 



In the absence of your Lord, so far as his vis- 
ible, personal presence is concerned, you are to be 
moved with fear lest his coming should find you 
not faithfully "occupying." "Watch therefore*, 
for ye know not what hour your Lord doth 
come/' 

So doing, while you may not be as fortunate 
as Wellington who "never lost a battle," yet your 
individual victories will be more numerous and 
your resultant joy and strength will be greater. 
When you fall, you can, in the face of the enemy, 
exultantly shout, "Rejoice not against me, O 
mine enemy; when I fall, I shall arise." You 
renew the fight under the inspiring belief that 
your Lord is coming and these individual con- 
flicts shall at length give place to an eternal tri- 
umph, when 

"You will lay your armor by 
And dwell with Christ at home. 

But then, also, the example of your Lord, as 
well as his command, is most encouraging. It is 
wonderfully human and sympathetic. "Who for 
the joy that was set before him endured the cross, 
despising the shame, and is set down at the right 
hand of the throne of God." 

Neither in the case of your Lord nor in yours 
was or is suffering and conflict to be chosen, en- 

197 



©o&'s Wlas ©ut 



dured, or delighted in for their own sake. "Con- 
sider him, then, that endured the contradiction of 
sinners against himself, lest you be weary and 
faint in your mind." It was refreshingly human 
and inspiringly sympathetic on the part of our 
Lord to place himself on record as being able to 
endure trial because of "joys set before him." He 
enjoyed suffering no more than you or I, but was 
willing for our sakes to endure them and was 
sustained by anticipated joys. 

"The thought that by his sufferings he should 
make satisfaction to the injured justice of God, 
and give security to his honor and government; 
make peace between God and man; seal and be 
the Mediator of the covenant of grace; should 
open a way of salvation to the chief of sinners, 
and effectually save all whom the Father had 
given him, and himself be the First-born among 
many brethren. This was the joy that was set 
before Him" 

Or again, "For the joy set before Him, of his 
own personal exaltation to the mediatorial throne 
of the salvation of countless millions of lost sin- 
ners from destruction; of bringing them to end- 
less happiness; and of eternally glorifying the 
whole Name, and all the perfections of God." 

While engaged in the conflict, then, it is your 
privilege to "have respect unto the recompense of 

198 



OoVs TPdlas ©ut 



reward," even as your Lord had, and under that 
inspiration to do and endure as otherwise might 
not be. 

In this, Jesus was but illustrating the applica- 
tion of "natural law in the spiritual world." If 
its sustaining power is felt, as it is, in the things 
of this life why not in relation to those of the life 
to come ? 

Here is a student patiently toiling and perse- 
veringly holding himself to it, while denying him- 
self much that would be pleasing and otherwise 
legitimate, but inconsistent at present with the 
accomplishment of his work. Why is he willing 
thus to deny himself and endure? He has "re- 
spect unto the recompense of reward.'' 

For the sake of a professional future and the 
joys thereof he is practicing the self-denials and 
obtaining the self-victories of the present. 

There are miners who endure many privations 
for years under the inspiration of the hope that a 
possible future of affluence awaits them. They 
may have loved ones, in relation to whom, the 
longed-for joy of being able to minister to them 
in certain ways, plays among the visions of a fu- 
ture, the power of whose attractions nerves the 
endeavors of the present. 

So with parents, as they endure burdens and 
practice self-denials and sacrifices for the sake of 



199 



(Bob's Hay Out 



worthy futures for their children and their own 
consequent parental joys. 

Applicable as it thus is to the whole circle of 
the earth life God projects it also into that of the 
spiritual and gives you the benefit of the Saviour's 
own use of it to cheer you amid present warfare 
by a well-grounded hope of final victory and full- 
ness of joy. With this vital difference, that in 
the life temporal all your hopes may be blasted, 
the joys you set before you may never be realized, 
but, in the spiritual life they are in all things well 
ordered and sure. 

As an inspiring stimulus to fight so as to ob- 
tain victories, individual as well as final, the au- 
thor of the Hebrews appeals to the presence of 
surrounding witnesses to quicken your best en- 
deavors. 

You may view the relation of these witnesses 
to you either in the light of those who faithfully 
testified to the truth, even unto death, and, by 
their example would lead you to like steady loy- 
alty, or, as those who are sympathetically inter- 
ested spectators of your conduct. In either case 
the thought should mightily move to heroic en- 
deavor. The "noble army of martyrs" has left 
you a legacy of self-sacrificing loyalty to the Lord 
Jesus, which is wonderfully quickening. "The 
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." 

200 



Gob's Mas <S>ut 



Their example has not been in vain. Other vic- 
tories have been won, other heroes and heroines 
of the faith have been produced because they so 
lived and died. And to be a hero or Heroine of 
the faith it is not necessary that you lay down 
your life on the high places of the field. "The 
Lord knoweth them that are his" and in the day 
when he will "make up his jewels" the crown 
unfading and the "well done" shall not be lacking 
for those who "feared the Lord and thought upon 
his name" in the comparative obscurities of the 
field. 

But you are also to feel the quickening influ- 
ence of those who are lovingly interested as 
spectators, in your career. This is felt in the va- 
rious walks of the secular life and it is not ruled 
out of the spiritual. In the Grecian games, from 
which the Apostle frequently borrows illustrations 
of higher truth, those who "strove for the mas- 
tery" felt the stimulating presence of the "cloud 
of witnesses." They ran or wrestled as otherwise 
they might not. 

A young lad goes out from the old home to 
fight the battle of life elsewhere. The loving 
hearts of parents, brothers, sisters, friends, follow 
him. They are watching him sympathetically. 
Will not the fact of this cloud of witnesses be 
realized by him as a force in his life impelling him 



©o&'s Mas <S>ut 



to fight and win victories along lines of righteous- 
ness? 

"A cloud of witnesses around 

Hold thee in full survey, 
Forget the steps already trod, 
And onward urge thy way." 

And then the solemn, while most cheering 
thought comes to inspire you, that an invisible 
host is round about you, interested in your con- 
flicts and triumphs. "And the Lord opened the 
eyes of the young man : and he saw : and behold, 
the mountain was full of horses and chariots of 
fire round about Elisha." And of the angels it is 
said: "Are they not all ministering spirits, sent 
forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of 
salvation ?" 

And as to the possible relationship of departed 
saints to the conflicts of the earth life — who 
knows ? 

In the middle ages tournaments formed one of 
the phases of the social life of the people. 
Champions entered the "lists" or enclosures, to 
contend with each other, either in sport or in 
mortal combat. Around the lists was a "great 
cloud of witnesses." And the contestants were 
not insensible to their presence, but were led to 



Gofc's Was ©ut 



the display of more chivalrous bearing and daring 
because of their sympathetic onlooking. 

But this influence was intensified by the fact 
that the prize or acknowledgment of victory was 
to be received from the hands of the Queen of 
Love and Beauty. Under the inspiration of those 
eyes and the anticipated reward from those hands 
they bore themselves as otherwise they would not. 

And to you, as you are "fighting the good fight 
of faith," having entered the lists against the 
world, the flesh and the devil," there abides with 
you the thrilling inspiration to do and to dare 
nobly, in that, among the great cloud of witnesses 
you behold one who is the "chief among ten thou- 
sand and altogether lovely," even Jesus, the "lover 
of your soul." He is tenderly watching you and 
from his pierced hands will come to you the 
award of victory and his voice will greet you 
with the "well done." 

"Awake my soul stretch every nerve, 

And press with vigor on, 
A heavenly race demands thy zeal 
And an immortal crown." 

What a joy to feel the old sin life with all its 
ills forever behind you. To be facing a future 
of unimagined and unimaginable glories, progres- 



203 



Gob's TWlas ©ut 



sive and endless, while you are imbued with the 
youthful and tireless energies of immortality. 

The disciples toil in rowing on storm-swept 
Galilee. "And it was now dark and Jesus was not 
come to them." But from the mountain side he 
is watching his own through darkness and tem- 
pest. He has not forgotten them. In the hour of 
their need he comes and, on the farther side, in the 
calm of the morning, as they tread the Galilean 
shore, in the fellowship of him who delivered them 
from all their fears, the memories of the night of 
sorrow only heighten the joys of the morrow. 
"Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh 
in the morning." In the "sweet fields beyond the 
swelling flood," with your back forever on the 
stormy Galilees of the mortal life, as you tread 
the peaceful, sun-lighted hills of eternity in the 
company of your Redeemer, with a holier joy, a 
deeper love and a more reverential adoration, 
because of sins and sorrows and salvations, will 
you look up into the face of your Saviour and 
King anl voice the songs of his redeeming grace. 
You will realize that the sufferings of the present 
were not worthy to be compared to the heavenly 
glories. 

Old soldiers, meeting in reunion, delight to re- 
count the experiences of the old life militant, — 
its privations, marches, battles, sieges, with all 



204 



<&oV& Map Out 



the lights and shadows which go to enhance the 
valuations of the present. They glory in their old 
tribulations — their scars, and all the evidences of 
warfare waged for love of country. And should 
the "old commander'' be present, whom they 
trusted and loved and who led them through 
arduous campaigns to many victories, tears of 
joy would well forth, hearts would throb and 
voices be raised in glad acclaim. 

So will you as a soldier of the cross be filled 
with a great and pure delight as you gather in 
the fellowships above and have with you the great 
Captain under whose banner you fought and by 
whose wisdom, power and love you were led to 
victories which issued in the "glory, honor, im- 
mortality" unfading and abiding. 

When you will "come to Mount Sion, and unto 
the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, 
and to an innumerable company of angels," 

"To the general assembly and church of the 
firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God 
the judge of all, and to the spirits of just men 
made perfect," 

"And to Jesus the mediator of the new cove- 
nant" what a "flow of soul and feast of reason" 
will you enjoy in the banqueting house of the 
great King, among such a goodly company of 
congenial spirits. The banner of the old Com- 

205 



OoVs Was Qui 



mander and Friend will wave over you — even the 
banner of love. 

A patient who is convalescing finds it to be de- 
lightfully comfortable merely to be freed from the 
old pains of his sickness. He revels in the mere 
quiescence or absence of physical ill, without re- 
gard to the on-coming joys which the abounding 
tides of life will bring with them when they again 
flow. 

So after the ills and conflicts of the earth life 
heaven will be delightsome because of their mere 
absence. And in fact this is the phase of heaven's 
desirability which at first mainly attracts us be- 
cause of the present pressure of evil. To be freed 
from every element which causes trouble as well 
as from all their effects, to have them taken out 
of the life, root and branch, — that is it which at 
first, and appropriately enough, captivates the 
soul's desire and fills the imagination as being the 
very acme of delight. 

Because of the absorbing presence and pressure 
of these things in this life, the Scriptures make 
large, if not chief, reference to them for consola- 
tion amid trial and for the quickening of hope as 
well as for the confirmation of loyal endeavor. 
Heaven is held up before the vision and the hope 
as the place where all the dark brood of earthly 
ills shall be forever debarred entrance. "Earth 



206 



Gob's WLay <§>ut 



has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal." "God 
shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and 
there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain ; for 
the former things are passed away." 

"And there shall in no wise enter into it any- 
thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh 
abomination, or maketh a lie." 

But the cessation of pain, delightfully restful 
though the sensation may be, after the feverish 
tossings of the antecedent illness, does not of itself 
constitute the chief joy of the physical life. In 
view of its immediate relation to freshly remem- 
bered experiences, and as the first answer to an 
urgent need, it may overshadow for the present 
all the other splendid possibilities of the renewed 
physical energies. But this will not, in the nature 
of things, continue. In the activities of the re- 
newed life and in the various conquests of its 
aggressive movements, in the mere fact of giving 
expression to its abounding vitality, — in all this 
there will be a greater fullness of joy than in the 
mere sensation of painlessness after pain. That 
is to say, there is more gladness in natural, un- 
forced activity, in giving expression to the en- 
ergies with which God has endowed us, than in a 
quiescence however restful, which indicates a re- 
lationship to antecedent disease. One is the full 



207 



Oofc'5 Tl&as ©ut 



sphere of health, the other is but a hemisphere 
dependent on another hemisphere of disease for 
its existence. The gambols of the young animals 
and the merry voices and romping sports of in- 
nocent childhood and youth are more pleasurable 
and indicative of a God-ordained physical state 
than freedom from pain after disease, however 
momentarily exquisite the sensation. The one 
faces backward in relation to sin and death, the 
other forward to wholeness (holiness) and life. 
And so while "after life's fitful fever" one may 
rest well and that will be a heavenly condition, 
yet it is not the soul's ultimate and exclusive 
"destined end or way.'' There is something 
higher and better in store for it than that. 

In the larger and abounding life of the future, 
amid the ever unfolding glories of eternity, the 
joys which will be forevermore filling it with 
ecstatic delight will not be because of quiescence 
after pain but because of the unceasing activities 
indicative and expressive of the health of immor- 
tality. 

The prisoner to whom the prison doors have 
been thrown open may shout with joy over his 
new found liberty. But related as this sensation 
of freedom is to antecedent bondage, its joy, how- 
ever keen, will not be so satisfying or durable as 



208 






Gob's WLay ©ut 



that which will arise from the uses to which the 
fact of freedom is applied. 

And so while in heaven you will rejoice with a 
joy unspeakable that the old is passed away for- 
ever, it will still be that your highest, best, most 
satisfying and durable joy will arise — not simply 
from the fact that the old is gone, but because of 
what the new will bring. And what that is to be, 
eternity alone will unfold. There are Scripture 
declarations regarding it which are entrancing to 
the vision and the hope, even by their concealings. 

The life on high is not rounded out in its glory 
and blessedness by the mere fact that it will be 
one where sin and sorrow shall not exist. Such 
things shall not be, but the question remains: 
"What will be?" And in the things that will be 
— there lie heaven's highest glories and joys. 
"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have 
entered into the heart of man, the things which 
God hath prepared for them that love him." 

Standing in the presence of the little that is 
revealed of heaven's possibilities and our meager 
apprehension of the same, we are like Newton, 
who said of himself, when considering the relation 
of his discoveries to the realm of the undiscovered 
"I do not know what I may appear ; but to myself 
I seem to have been only like a boy playing on 



209 



6o&'s Was ©tit 



the seashore and diverting myself in now and then 
finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than 
ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all 
undiscovered before me." 

And in harmony therewith" the words of an- 
other : "When one who has never sailed out upon 
the ocean stands on its shore and watches its trem- 
bling waves as they surge and break upon the 
sands, how little does he know of the majesty and 
grandeur of the great deep, of its storms, of its 
power, of its secrets, of its unfathomable cham- 
bers, of its unweighed treasures. He sees only 
the little silver edge that breaks at his feet. 

"So we stand where the Spirit of God breaks 
upon the shore of our world. We see its silver 
edge. We feel the splash of its waves upon our 
hearts. But of its infinite reaches and outgoings 
beyond our shores we know almost nothing. Yet 
blessed are they who even stand by the shore and 
lave their hearts in even the shallowest edciies of 
this divine ocean." 

An ^eternity of growth up into God in all the 
knowledge of which our redeemed souls will be 
capable, as he will be eternally revealing himself, 
his works and ways to us, our cups overflowing 
with blessedness and joy unspeakable — to such 
an estate will your final victory bring you. Surely 
in the light and life and love of the heavenly 



Gob's TKHas <§>ut 



places you will be "lost in wonder, love and 
praise." 

"O mother dear Jerusalem, 

When shall I come to thee? 
When shall my sorrows have an -end? 

Thy joys when shall I see? 
O happy harbor of God's saints, 

O sweet and pleasant soil! 
In thee no terror can be found, 

Nor grief nor care, nor toil." 

Unto the Lord Jesus Christ, "Who of God is 
made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and 
sanctification, and redemption," be "the greatness, 
and the power, and the glory, and the victory," 
for ever and ever. Amen. 



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